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Referential and lexical givenness: Semantic, prosodic and cognitive aspects

The main objective of the paper is to show that for an adequate analysis of an item’s information status in spoken language two levels of givenness have to be investigated: a referential and a lexical level . This separation is a crucial step towards our goal to arrive at the best possible classification of nominal expressions occurring in natural discourse which reflects our understanding of all important aspects related to an item’s givenness or novelty (“information status”) . For that purpose, we first introduce our motivation for this division which stems from the observation that both levels of information status have an influence on an  item’s prosodic marking . Section 2 presents basic concepts  including  the cognitive dimensions which have been discussed in the literature on givenness, in particular the role of knowledge, consciousness and (un)importance . In Section 3, we give an overview of influential proposals to classify and order the various concepts . In doing so, we explain and relate the most important concepts that play a role in classifying nominal expressions: coreference, bridging, inference, hearer knowledge,  indexicality, embeddedness . A number of paradoxes and inconsistencies of the presented approaches are discussed, which can be  resolved  by  the  insight  that  there  are  two  different  notions  of  givenness which apply  to expressions of different  syntactic-semantic  type . We  refer  to them as referential givenness (r-givenness) and lexical givenness ( l-givenness), and provide the semantic basis for these two concepts . In Section 4, we propose a fine-grained two-level annotation scheme for the analysis of an item’s information status, called the RefLex scheme . Section 5 takes a closer look at  the prosody of the proposed labels in combination and develops a couple of hypotheses which are tested in two small exemplary corpora of spontaneous and read German speech .