The Syntax of Givenness Ivona Kucerová

We will see in chapter 4, however, that the correlation with definite articles is not accidental.
I will argue that the purpose of both reordering for givenness and definiteness marking
is to maximize presupposition (Heim, 1991). While the two strategies are in principle different,
their realization may sometimes be identical.
I thus argue that the nature of the reordering found in (2-b) is indeed to mark that
something has already been introduced in the discourse. An interesting fact to observe
is that even though the SVO order has multiple interpretations, certain interpretations are
excluded and they can be achieved only by reordering. This suggests that the purpose of
the reordering is to achieve an interpretation that would not be available otherwise. 5
I will argue shortly that this ordering correlates with a requirement that given (old, presupposed)
elements linearly precede elements that are new (asserted, non-presupposed) in
the discourse. While in (2-a) this requirement can be satisfied within the SVO order, in
case of the (2-b) examples, reordering is needed.
The examples in (1-c) and (1-d), repeated below as (4-a) and (4-b), are rather different.
While in the examples in (2-a) and (2-b) at least one participant has not been introduced in
the discourse yet, the examples in (4-a) and (4-b) contain only previously introduced participants.
In other words, the utterances in (2-a) and (2-b) correspond to an assertion that
combines something already presupposed with something that has not been presupposed
yet. In contrast, the utterance in (1-c)–(1-d) operates on an already asserted proposition.
The meaning of the SOV order in (4-a) can be either verification of the true value of the
proposition, or correction of a part of the proposition by excluding other alternatives. 6
Similarly, the example in (4-b) corresponds to an utterance about already introduced participants
and it comments on their relation (contrastive topic or topic).
(4) a. SOV: The boy did find the lollipop. (He did not steal it.)
b. OSV: As for the lollipop, the boy found it (but as for the chocolate, he got it
from his mother).
The study presented here concerns mainly the type of examples given in (2). Before I
undertake a closer investigation of these cases I want to provide the reader with some further
observations that will help to clarify why it is useful to treat the examples in (2) as separate
from the examples in (4). We have already seen that the type of reordering witnessed in
(2) may teach us something about the way presupposed and non-presupposed elements are
marked in a language that does not have overt articles. Everything being equal, the English
translations of the Czech examples in (2) differ only in the use of articles. There are no
other obvious changes in syntax, prosody or morphology. The English translations of the
Czech examples in (4) are very different in this respect. Both have marked prosody (pitch
5 We will see in this chapter and especially in section 1.2 that SVO is the basic word order in Czech. I will
argue that a basic word order in general allows more flexibility in interpretation than a derived word order.
6 In literature on information structure, this type of construction is often referred to as verum focus, i.e.,
a construction where the speaker verifies or denies that an already presupposed proposition is true, or contrastive
focus or correction, in case the speaker asserts an exclusion of an alternative that might have been
introduced by the previous context.
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