236 María de los Ángeles Gómez-González
Of importance here is to bear in mind that ‘givenness’ and ‘presupposition’
evoke two different concepts. Broadly speaking, givenness is a discourse
notion referring to the informational status of the constituents of a message
as determined by the speaker’s view of the situational and linguistic
co(n)text and indicated by attenuated morphosyntactic and phonological
forms (e.g. pronominalization, definiteness, lower pitch, weaker stress, etc.).
Conversely, presupposition is a logico-semantic notion realized by sentence
form which involves a ‘proposition’ (i.e. a potential sentence having the ca-
pacity of being true or false), whose assumability is required for the success
of the message (Jackendoff 1972: 276–278). Accordingly, a proposition
may convey Given information, but need not be presupposed (e.g. It can't
be true, as an answer to I saw the man, where it stands as given information,
but the proposition is not presupposed). Or, vice versa, informationally new
items may occur within a presupposition (e.g. What the duke gave to my
aunt was that teapot, where it is presupposed that the duke gave something
to someone (my aunt), but the identity of that something is presented as
news). An ‘open proposition’, in turn, refers here to a kind of proposition
“which contains one or more variables, and it represents what is assumed by
the speaker to be salient [in the presupposition] in the discourse [...]. The
variable of the open proposition is instantiated with the focus of the utter-
ance” (Ward 1985: 5).- For alternative demarcations of the Theme-Rheme partitions see e.g. Halli-
day (1994), Berry (1996), and Dik (1997). - Subject has special status as a point of attachment to what has already been
constructed and a point of access to what is currently being constructed
(Chafe 1994), hence its tendency to be given rather than new in discourse.
This is consonant with Langacker’s (1998, 1999) view that Subject and Ob-
ject are the first and second conceptual reference points accessed in building
up to the full conception of a profiled relationship: Subject is a normally ini-
tial participant invoked for purposes of arriving at the conceptualization of a
profiled relationship, while an Object is a target evoked in the context of
conceptualizing a relationship in which the Subject participates. Langacker
concludes that, since the Subject anchors the conception of a relationship
encompassing the Object, both tend to coalign with Given vs. New informa-
tion respectively. - Observe the awkwardness of the ‘zooming out’ strategies below ⎯ note
that there here is not to be confused with existential there:
i. and my packet of biscuits was on the table, where my
newspaper had been, there.
ii. and on the table, where my newspaper had been, there
was my packet of biscuits.