Milton Friedman y la Teoría de la Renta Permanente

So far I have defended the following premises: (1) Focus (unlike Givenness) doesnotex- hibit the key characteristics of a syntactic feature, (2) the only grammatical constraints on Focus are phonological, (3) the most likely role for Focus in the architecture of grammar is as a structure on Phonological Form which determines prosody, and which is included as part of a structured representation of the speaker’s contribution to the discourse, (4) seman- tic effects of Focus must arise from a language-external filter on which Focus structures are chosen in which kinds of contexts, and (5) this position is only tenable if the behavior of Focus (modulointeractions with other independent aspects of a language’s grammar) has some universal communicative advantage. I now turn attention to the conditional clause in the fifth premise: the question of whether generalizations about Focus placement reflect some universal communicative strategy. I argue the affirmative—Focus imposes a layer of redundancy on language, and choices about Focus placement reflect an optimization be- tween creating useful redundancy and minimizing overall prominence. This optimization problem is solved by taking into account interlocutors’ expectations in discourse.

To begin this argument, let’s return to the phenomenon of ellipsis. A single narrowly Focused constituent can stand alone as the answer to an explicit Question Under Discus- sion.

(31) Q: Who chastised Bob at the party? A: Nancy Pelosi.

Non-Focused material is left out of the answer altogether. Recall that Focus is special in this behavior. Example (6), repeated below as (32), illustrates that Given material is not left out unless it is completely outside of the Focus domain. In other words, only constituents that would be on prosodic layer 0, without considering any prosodic effects of Givenness, can be elided.

(32) a. (i) Q: Who chastised Bob at the party?

A: [FNancy Pelosi ] chastised Bob at the party (Focus)

(ii) Bob keeps getting chastised at this party. You won’t believe this: #[FNancy Pelosi [Gchastised Bob ] ] (Givenness)

b. (i) Q: Where did Nancy Pelosi chastise the Senator?

A: Nancy Pelosi chastised the Senator [F At the State of the Union ] (Focus)

(ii) The Senator keeps getting chastised by Pelosi! You won’t believe this: #[F[GNancy Pelosi chastised the Senator ] At the State of the Union ] (Givenness)

The same phenomenon is found in other languages as well, e.g. German. (33) Q: Was

whathathaserhemitwithdemthe Brieflettergetan?done ‘What did he do with the letter?’ A: Einem

a.dat Kindchildgeschickt.sent ‘Sent it to a child.’

The availability of these sub-clausal answers suggests that the inclusion of non-Focused material is unnecessary. But it is not the case that there is a one-to-one mapping between Focus and ability to stand alone as the answer to a question. For example, one cannot elide the material between two different Foci.

(34) Q: Who ordered what at the Tofu Palace? A: #Mary, grilled tofu. I, a salad.

We may say that an answer to a question must consist of a single constituent, at least in typical contexts. In cases of multiple Foci, a full clausal answer is required.

Moreover, even in cases where one has a choice, as between (35–i) and (35–ii), there may be reasons to prefer one over the other.

(35) Q: Who ordered the Banh Mi? A: (i) BOBordered the Banh Mi

(ii) Bob.

I leave it to the reader to imagine reasons why one could prefer (35–i) in certain cases. The nature of those reasons is not important for the present discussion. What is important is the undeniable fact that both (35–i) and (35–ii) are possible, and that (35–i) instantiates the only felicitous accent pattern for the sentence in this context. In other words, if the speaker decides, for whatever reason, to utter the entire clause instead of the single-word answer, that utterance must have a prosodic structure that results in the intonational contour shown in (35–i). And it is surely no coincidence that the higher layer of prominence corresponds to the only material that couldnotbe elided. This echoes Halliday’s (1967) original analyis of information structure where Focus is taken to be the “informative” contribution to a sentence. In a sense I am merely arguing for a return to this simple idea, at least for the canonical case, but coupled with a formal analysis of what makes something “informative” and a way of extending that analysis to less obvious uses of Focus (e.g. contrastive Focus in “farmer” sentences). In highlighting what is “informative”, as if the hearer could not herself evaluate what is and isn’t crucial to her own interpretation of an utterance, Focus can itself be seen as redundant.8 _{We may think of linguistic communication as a behavior whose}

goal is the transmission of information from speaker to hearer. It is a staple of information theory that redundancy is valuable for the transmission of information. Consider Claude Shannon on the ideal encoding of a message in the presence of noise.

An approximation to the ideal would have the property that if the signal is altered in a reasonable way by the noise, the original can still be recovered. In other words the alteration will not in general bring it closer to another rea- sonable signal than the original. This is accomplished at the cost of a certain amount of redundancy in the coding. (Shannon, 1948, p.414).

8_{Roberts (1996) addresses this idea as well. The marking of Focus in natural language is not necessary}

for conveying truth conditions. One possible exception (see the end of this chapter for a brief discussion) is the association of Focus with operators likeonly.

In (35–i) the speaker has chosen a redundant encoding of their message: they included the entire sentence when a single phrase could have sufficed. We may view Focus as a further layer of redundancy. The speaker did not only choose an entire sentence, but they put an extra layer of prominence on the material that is crucial for the hearer’s interpretation of the utterance. More specifically, the speaker has placed extra prominence on a constituent such thatif the utterance consistedonlyof that constituent, it could still allow the hearer to arrive at the speaker’s intended meaning. This makes the speaker’s “signal”, i.e. utterance, more robust to noise. To mingle Shannon’s words with my own:

An approximation to the ideal prosodic pattern would have the property that if the speaker’s signal is altered in a way that obscures the least prominent ma- terial (i.e. the lowest prosodic layers), the original intended meaning can still be recovered. In other words the alteration will not make some other intended meaning more likely given the current discourse context. This is accomplished at the cost of (redundantly) elevating certain elements to prominence over other elements.

What does it mean to make one meaning “more likely” than another? The answer is sim- ple: meaning A is more likely than meaning B iff the hearerbelievesthat a discourse move conveying meaning A is more probable than a discourse move conveying meaning B. And what mediates these beliefs? We are already familiar with one such mechanism: Ques- tions Under Discussion. Consider a model of the world where three individuals exist: Al, Barry and Chelsea. This model is part of a discourse with two interlocutors and a QUD on the table, ‘Who arrived first to the party?’, which is represented by a set of possible answers {‘Al arrived first to the party’,‘Barry arrived first to the party’,‘Chelsea arrived first to the party’}. The QUD by its very nature introduces a belief: the hearerexpectsthe speaker’s next discourse move to convey a proposition that is part of the QUD set. This is, in essence, what it means to be “under discussion”. Given this expected set of propositions, the transmission of the signal “Barry” makes the meaning ‘Barry arrived first to the party’ maximally probable in virtue of the fact that (1) given the hearer’s beliefs, the meanings of the form ‘x arrived first to the party’ area priorimore probable than all other possible meanings at the time of transmission, and (2) only one of these probable meanings involves Barry. One goal of the formalization of this idea is to specify precisely what it means for a proposition to “involve” some semantic object. But it is hopefully intuitively clear that QUDs delimit expectations in discourse and allow hearers to calculate intended meanings even when the entire intended proposition is not encoded in the speaker’s utterance. If

the speaker chooses, perhaps redundantly, to encode the entire intended proposition, the presence of noise during signal transmission makes it communicatively optimal to assign additional prominence to the part of the signal which could have stood alone as a signal under ideal conditions. This makes the most crucial component of the signal less likely to be lost, maximizing the probability of successful coordination around the intended mean- ing. Moreover, it allows the speaker to minimize the overall level of prominence, which could be seen as an instantiation of the kind of economy principle which permeates Gricean pragmatics.9

At the end of this chapter I show that some contrastive uses of Focus can be straightfor- wardly accounted for by considering discourse expectations. These cases are ones like in (36) where nested Focus is being used to correct some prior belief on the part of the hearer. I take these to be the canonical instances of contrastive Focus.

(36) Q: Mary’s uncle, who buys and sells expensive convertibles, came to her wed- ding. What did she get from him as a gift?

A: She got [Fa [FCHEAP ] convertible ]

Here the context makes it clear that the questioner finds it highly probable that Mary’s uncle bought her an expensive convertible. (If the questioner did not have this belief, the setup to the question would violate the Maxim of Relevance.) Given this context, we can ask: what would the hearer consider to be the most likely intended meaning for the signal “cheap”? A cheap convertible, or something else that is cheap? If we grant that the hearer was expecting something of the form ‘a P convertible’ moreso than, say, ‘a P food processor’, the hearer would be more likely to reconstruct ‘a cheap convertible’ if the signal were merely “cheap”—this is the same game, but played at prosodic layer 2 instead of prosodic layer 1. Of course, this alone does not explain MEC effects: why couldn’t the speaker have said “she got a BLUE convertible”? In the next section I show that MEC effects can be reduced to framing effects in the sense of Bacharach (1993, 2006), which are part of the architecture of cooperative signalling games. This same game-theoretic framework allows us to derive non-canonical uses of contrastive Focus, e.g. in farmer sentences, via Gricean implicature.

9_{In ASL and other signed languages, Focus is encoded by doubling a sign, i.e. repeating a Focused lexical}

item in a lower position in the sentence (Petronio, 1993; Petronio and Lillo-Martin, 1997). By analogy, one could imagine intonational Focus in spoken language as a way of “doubling” the signal. Loosely speaking, placing an additional layer of prominence on a certain constituent could be seen as a prosodic analog to repeating that constituent. Repetition is the simplest form of redundancy: in case part of the signal is lost, simply repeat the most crucial information to minimize the risk of misunderstanding.

(37) An AMERICAN farmer was talking to a CANADIAN farmer. . .

To finish the discussion about the role of Focus in the language faculty, before moving on to the game-theoretic analysis, I take stock of the arguments made thus far and briefly consider some of their wider implications.