Book Cover -- Series Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedications -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Background: Previous Work and Relevant Theory -- 3. A Goal-based Model of Syntactic Choice -- 4. An Empirical Study of Discourse Structure and Non-canonical Word Order -- 5. Conclusions and Future Directions -- Bibliography -- Index.

Users of natural languages have many word orders with which to encode the same truth-conditional meaning. They choose contextually appropriate strings from these many ways with little conscious effort and with effective communicative results. Previous computational models of when English speakers produce non-canonical word orders, like topicalization, left-dislocation and clefts, fail. The primary goal of this book is to present a better model of when speakers choose to produce certain non-canonical word orders by incorporating the effects of discourse context and speaker goals on syntactic choice. This book makes extensive use of previously unexamined naturally occurring corpus data of non-canonical word order in English, both to illustrate the points of the theoretical model and to train the statistical model.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2018. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.