So let’s talk about information.
When we’re talking to someone, we need to be able to tell the difference between what’s
important and what isn’t.
We need a system that works for us, every hour of every day — sifting out the old
from the new and keeping track of the topic of conversation, so that we know exactly what
we should pay attention to.
But how do we decide what we should focus on, and what’s just irrelevant background noise?
I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is The Ling Space.
A lot of work goes into building a sentence!
We have to choose our words, and check if each one's been built up out of the right parts, in the right order.
We’ve got to know how to pronounce everything in just the right way, and how neighbouring
sounds affect each other according to our language’s phonology.
And then we need to group our words, so all the pieces fit together syntactically.
And we have to do all this while making sure our meanings fit the context and communicate
what we want them to.
Of course, we’ve got conversational maxims to help us out along the way, like staying concise,
truthful, and relevant.
These are the rules we follow to help us cooperate with each other, so that everything we say
fits with who we’re talking to and what we’re talking about.
But what are we actually doing when we talk?
Like, what are we trying to accomplish? What's the point?
Well, one way of thinking about it is that we’re working to expand our common ground,
which we’ve talked about before.
The common ground is the shared knowledge that exists between two or more speakers.
It’s not everything that each of them knows, because everyone has their secrets.
It’s more like a big collection of everything that I know you know, and everything that
you know I know, and everything I know you know I know . . . and so on.
Think of it like a long list of things we’ve agreed to agree are true.
And when we have a conversation, we work towards adding to this list, either by asking for
information or offering it up for free.
But we can’t dump just any old sentence into the common ground.
Not everything slots in there.
For one, sentences can be separated into what they assert and what they presuppose.
In other words, that’s the content we’re trying to add, and the assumptions it carries with it.
So, if I say something like “Fusco’s helping us with the case,” that assumes a few things,
like we both know who that is, and we know about the case I’m bringing up.
But mostly I’m just offering up some new information, and so it won’t have a hard
time at all getting into our common ground.
But if I say “Fusco’s stopped helping us with the case,” I’m not just claiming
he stopped, I’m taking it for granted that at some point in the past he was helping.
And if that’s not something you were already aware of, the sentence will come as a
surprise to you at best, and be impossible to understand at worst.
So, there are conditions of entry into the common ground for our sentences; you only
get in if you easily connect up with what’s already there.
We can accommodate making small assumptions, like how you probably won’t think it’s
too weird if I tell you “my dog only understands commands in Dutch,” even if you didn’t
know I already had a dog.
But if I just popped in and told you “the government’s top-secret, super intelligent
surveillance system only understands Dutch,” you’d be rightly skeptical if we hadn’t
already established that such a thing exists.
And it turns out that when we construct our sentences, we’re not just following the
same blueprint every single time; we’re structuring the information in a way that
maximizes its chances of making into the common ground and building our conversational world.
So, what are some of the ways that we do this?
Well, the distinction between what a sentence asserts and what it presupposes gets to the
heart of how we structure information.
What we care about when we’re trying to communicate is which part of our information
would be considered new, and what would be considered given.
This difference between what you expect your conversation partner to know and not know
is so important that languages have found a bunch of ways to point it up and package
information to fit the needs of the moment.
If we don’t structure our sentences the right way, things can actually get really strange.
So like, if somebody asked you what Mr. Reese went to get and you said “it was JOHN who
got the bazooka,” that would be really weird.
Even if you knew Mr. Reese and John were the same person, and even though it does answer
the question, the structure and intonation just seem . . . off.
So, how do we make sure that conversations flow as smoothly as possible?
One way to signal which part of a sentence contains new information, and which is presupposed,
is by our choice of determiner, which we’ve seen a bit of already.
Roughly speaking, if we’re introducing a new idea into the conversation, we’ll tend
to use the indefinite article, like “there’s a machine that spies on you.”
But if something, or someone, has already been established earlier on, it'd be much
more natural to use a demonstrative determiner like “this” or “that”, or the definite article.
You might now say, for instance, “the Machine knows everything about you.”
It doesn’t even need to be something you’ve recently talked about: if I said “the government’s
after us,” the country we were in would make it clear enough who I meant.
But one of the biggest ways we mark new information is by using focus.
In English, we mostly do this by putting prominent stress on a word or phrase, so it stands
out compared to background information.
Like, if someone asked “who loves Sameen,” a standard kind of reply would be something
like “SAMANTHA loves Sameen,” where the new material is focused, highlighting it as
newer than the rest, which was already part of the question.
And we don’t just use focus for answering questions; we can also do it to make corrections.
Like, say someone thought that Nathan survived; to adjust their understanding, you might say
“FINCH survived”.
Or we can stress a word to emphasize the truth of a statement, like in “Harold DID see
Grace on the computer monitor.”
The common thread linking all these uses of focus is that it’s calling attention to
the fact that we’re selecting from a set of possible alternatives.
We’re saying that amongst all the individuals that could fill the slot, this is the one that fits.
And while manipulating the information structure of a sentence usually has more to do with
outside packaging than internal content, focus can even affect the meaning, under the right circumstances.
Like, let’s say John and Harold are good guys who want to support people in trouble.
Then the sentence “John and Harold always help the VICTIM” should definitely be true,
since they’re not going to go around helping criminals.
But “JOHN AND HAROLD always help the victim” can easily turn out be false, if there are
other people who also help.
Now, focus can really land anywhere in a sentence, to underscore what’s new.
But, there’s also a bias in English towards starting off with older information, establishing
where things are at, and then following it up with something that moves the discussion forward.
So, take the sentence “as for Bear, he’ll be fine,” or “as far as most people are
concerned, Harold Finch is just a teacher.”
Those phrases “as for” and “as far as” pick out what’s called the topic of the
sentence — what the sentence is about.
And aboutness is the other big concern that we have when we communicate.
These phrases help us by setting up what’s called a topic-comment structure, which introduces
something to be discussed, and then says something new about it.
And while English uses certain phrases to do the job, other languages are what you could call
topic-prominent - like Japanese, which has dedicated morphemes that pick out the topic.
All you have to do is stick a は on something, and you immediately know that’s the topic.
Take our Bear sentence from before: it’d be ベアーは大丈夫です。
Still other languages, like American Sign Language, tend to move constituents to the front, past the subject.
And this kind of topicalization is something we see a bit of in English, too.
So, the default word order in English is subject - verb - object, as in “I have my doubts about Elias.”
But if we were already talking about him, and whether or not he was trustworthy, it
might also make sense to set up the sentence like “Elias, I have my doubts about.”
And, in fact, we often use special word orders to help with the flow.
So, like, if we generally want to keep old information first, and new last, we could
passivize a sentence whose object had already been mentioned, as in “the perpetrator was stopped".
Or if we really want to focus in on something, we can use what’s called a cleft sentence,
which can either start with “it” or “what.”
So, while by default we might say “Zoe fixed the problem,” if we wanted to emphasize
that no one else did, we could say “it was ZOE who fixed it.”
Or if we wanted to emphasize what she did, instead, we could say “what Zoe did was
FIX THE PROBLEM,” which focuses in on the action instead of the agent.
Finally, these specialized word orders, like passives and clefts, aren’t only useful
for structuring the flow of information, they can also help us probe the internal structures
of sentences.
Only words grouped together as a syntactic chunk called a constituent can be passivized
or clefted.
So if we can say “it’s up on the roof where you’ll find John,” we know that
“up on the roof” must form a cohesive part of the syntactic structure.
And because we can’t say “the Man in was seen the Suit,” we know “the Man in”
doesn’t form a constituent; we can only really say “the Man in the Suit was seen,”
since that noun phrase and prepositional phrase form a pair.
Whether it’s helping hold together conversations or exploring the structure of a language,
when it comes to information, it’s definitely a topic that’s important to focus on.
So, we’ve reached the end of The Ling Space for this week.
If you followed my comments on this week’s topic, you learned that part of the reason
we have conversations is to increase the common ground shared between speakers; that we have
to structure the information in our sentences, to make sure they connect in the right way;
that we use things like intonation and word order to help us focus in on new information,
and keep track of the topic of conversation; and that these tools give us valuable insights
into how sentences are built!
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman, and directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost.
This week’s episode was written by Stephan Hurtubise.
Our editor is Georges Coulombe, our music is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team
is atelierMUSE.
We’re down in the comments below, or you can bring the discussion back over to our
website, where we’ll have some extra material on this topic.
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And we’ll see you in two weeks. Tikala malamu!