The role of pragmatics in shaping linguistic structures

The role of pragmatics in shaping linguistic structures is notoriously difficult to establish in a replicable fashion. In this chapter, we apply operational definitions of the discourse-pragmatic notions of referent accessibility and topicality to spontaneous speech data and test their impact on noun phrase realization (lexical vs. pronominal vs. unexpressed subjects) and word order (pre-vs. postverbal subjects). Accessibility is constrained by discourse referentiality, as the given-new distinction is inapplicable to nouns when they are not used to track an entity in discourse; for example, in predicate nominals (e.g., ella es profesora ‘she is a teacher’). Operationalized as distance from previous mention, accessibility affects variable subject realization and also provides an account for grammatical person differences, third-person pronominal and unexpressed human subjects tending to cluster more than first-person subjects. Topicality includes accessibility and, as a feature of the importance of a referent, can be operationalized as persistence in subsequent mentions. While topicality does not affect subject-verb order globally, an effect of persistence is localized in particular word order constructions. By examining syntactic structures in their discourse contexts in speech corpora, we demonstrate how pragmatic considerations in speakers’ choices can be revealed through the quantitative analysis of variation between structural alternatives.