The effect of a pragmatic presupposition on syntactic structure in question answering

This paper investigates the relationship between a speaker's decision to treat portions of the information in a sentence as given or new and the syntactic form of the sentence produced. It was hypothesized that alternative surface structures are used differentially in order to array the information in sentences with given information preceding new information. This hypothesis was supported in a question-answering task. Results showed that answers to questions retained the syntactic structure and the order of given and new information from previously presented sentences when the original sentences placed given before new information. However, when the original sentence positioned new information before given, and alternative syntactic form was used and the order of information was reversed in subjects' answers.

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