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Everything about Givenness
Quality of information that is assumed to be known to the listener
In linguistics, givenness is the degree to which a speaker assumes certain contextual information of a topic of discourse is already known to the listener. The speaker thus considers it unnecessary to provide further contextual information through an expression's linguistic properties. A given contextual information in a discourse is assumed to be known by the addressee in the moment of utterance, therefore a given expression must be known from prior discourse. Wikipedia →
🧭 Start here: a 6-step reading path
- Read the overview: GivennessA 5-minute orientation
- Skim a recent paper: All Focus is Contrastive: On Polarity (Verum) Focus, Answer Focus, Contrastive Focus and GivennessInfluential work since 2022
- Pick up a classic book: ProntoThe most-reprinted book on the subject
- Read the landmark paper: GIVENNESS, AVOIDF AND OTHER CONSTRAINTS ON THE PLACEMENT OF ACCENT*Cited 388 times
- Go sideways: PresuppositionA closely related topic
- Go sideways: Discourse representation theoryA closely related topic
📖 Definitions
Noun The fact of being given or posited in an argument, hypothesis etc.
Noun The quality of being given; existence.
🗂️ The subject at a glance
🏆 Landmark papers (most cited)
GIVENNESS, AVOIDF AND OTHER CONSTRAINTS ON THE PLACEMENT OF ACCENT*
Sentential devices for conveying givenness and newness: A cross-cultural developmental study
Contrastive focus, givenness and the unmarked status of “discourse-new”
A processing-centered look at the contribution of givenness to durational reduction
The notion of ‘givenness’ and its relations to presupposition and to theme
Coreference, lexical givenness and prosody in German
Reference and Accessibility from a Givenness Hierarchy Perspective
Givenness, procedural meaning and connectives. The case of French puisque
🆕 Influential since 2022
All Focus is Contrastive: On Polarity (Verum) Focus, Answer Focus, Contrastive Focus and Givenness
Information-structural surprises? Contrast, givenness, and (the lack of) accent shift and deaccentuation in non-assertive speech acts
Kant on the givenness of space and time
Embodiment and Violence: From Lived Experience to Imagistic Givenness
Passive in Kazym Khanty and the Interaction of Givenness, Topicality and Animacy
📚 Books worth reading
ProntoElmore Leonard · 1993
When the Women Come Out to DanceElmore Leonard · 2002
Riding the RapElmore Leonard · 1995
RaylanElmore Leonard · 2012
Wave PhenomenaDudley H. Towne · 1967- 📕Monstrous OntologiesCaterina Nirta, Andrea Pavoni · 2021
- 📕Fuller surname U.S. census indexJohn Beattie Fuller · 2008
La légende de Saint GuirecHenri Morienval · 1925
Ranked by number of editions on Open Library, a rough measure of how lasting a book is.
🔗 Related topics
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- Focus (linguistics) In linguistics, focus (abbreviated foc) is a grammatical category that conveys the part of the sentence that contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive…
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