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Relationship Between Discourse Notions and the Lexicon: From the Perspective of Chinese Information Structure

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11831))

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Abstract

This paper investigates the properties of information structure (IS), focusing on the relationship between the discourse notions (i.e. topic and focus) and the lexicon. The feature-based approach suggests that topic and focus are formal features which are numerated from the lexicon, active in the computational system and encoded in syntax. However, this approach has received some criticisms regarding the generation of IS, such as the violation of the inclusiveness condition, the employment of the “look-ahead” technique, the neglect of discourse pragmatic properties of topic/focus and the exclusion of the non-configurational IS. The key issue is that the semantic-syntactic properties of the lexical items in IS are relevant to the lexicon, but the pragmatic properties of IS are determined by factors out of the lexicon. IS should not be the result of pure syntactic computation, but a phenomenon of syntactic-pragmatic interface.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It should be noted that the given information is old materials including but not limited to topic and the new information is new materials including but not limited to focus [5, p. 683].

  2. 2.

    Xu [4] also points out that some informational foci in modern Mandarin Chinese are configurational.

  3. 3.

    Φ-feature is a cover term for gender, number, and person.

  4. 4.

    The term lexicon in this paper is the mental lexicon, a kind of mental dictionary where the lexical information is stored.

  5. 5.

    In order to avoid terminological chaos, hence, in this paper, respectively the terms of Topic and Focus in the examples like (1) and (2) refer to the topic constituent and the focus constituent, Top and Foc describe the formal features of topic and focus, and TopP and FocP are the abbreviated forms of Topic Phrase and Focus Phrase.

  6. 6.

    Here v is a light verb, which is null with much the same causative interpretation as the verb make [16, p. 339]. Call v with full argument structure v*: transitive v or experiencer [8, p. 43].

  7. 7.

    The syntax of a sentence consists of three layers: the VP layer, the inflectional layer and the complementiser layer, [11], which are built in a bottom-up fashion successively. Therefore, the DP in (4A) is recovered to be the specifier of TP on the lower layer, not the specifier of CP on the higher layer.

  8. 8.

    The local scope of a phase is the size of the phase.

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Acknowledgments

This paper is supported by the Key Research Fund Project from Hunan Planning Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences, China (Project NO.: 18ZDB034; Project Title: A Study of the Recursion-Only Hypothesis in Language: from a Biolinguistic Perspective). I thank Professor Liu Li-min from Sichuan University, and two anonymous reviewers, as well as other participants of CLSW 2019 for helpful comments. All errors and misinterpretations remain entirely my responsibility.

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  1. School of Foreign Languages, Xiangtan University, Xiangtan, Hunan Province, China

    Shun-Hua Fu

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  1. Shun-Hua Fu
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jia-Fei Hong

  2. Beijing Information Science and Technology University, Beijing, China

    Yangsen Zhang

  3. Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing, China

    Pengyuan Liu

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Fu, SH. (2020). Relationship Between Discourse Notions and the Lexicon: From the Perspective of Chinese Information Structure. In: Hong, JF., Zhang, Y., Liu, P. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11831. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38189-9_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38189-9_3

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