Meta-informative Centering in Utterances

The notion of information has nowadays become crucial both in our daily life and in many branches of science and technology. In language studies, this notion was used as a technical term for the first time about at least fifty years ago. It is argued, however, that "Old" and "New", used traditionally for characterising information, refer in fact to the meta-informative status of communicated chunks of information. They provide information about other information. Since subjects and objects, as attention-driven phrases, are also related to aboutness, the presented Meta-Informative Centering (MIC) framework includes predication theory. By applying the MIC theory to their analyses of English, German, French, Polish, Russian, Greek, Latin, and Japanese, the authors provide comprehensive explanations of the most puzzling aspects of the pragmatic use of basic universal linguistic categories. It seems clear now that canonical syntactic patterns, their permutations, and diverse transformations do indeed reflect very truly the meta-informative encapsulation of utterances. As a consequence, this book presents new and coherent theoretical solutions as well as their very efficient applications.

Yasunari Harada, Professor at School of Law and Director at the Institute for Digital Enhancement of Cognitive Development, Waseda University:
The volume Meta-Informative Centering in Utterances: between Semantics and Pragmatics edited by André & Hélène Włodarczyk is a long-awaited publication. Through a series of international academic conferences held at the Centre for Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (CELTA), MIC Sorbonne 2008, 2010 and 2012, the participants witnessed how the MIC theory evolved and received international recognition among linguistic communities. Meta-Informative Centering theory is particularly interesting for researchers in Japanese and other languages in which social and interactional relationships among participants of linguistic communication are marked by grammatical forms. Linguistic theories that deal with syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects of languages abound, but MIC is unique in offering a coherent view of how those aspects interact to form the grammatical structure of a given language. This book is highly recommended to students and researchers interested in unifying socio-cultural aspects of language diversity in close connection with rigorous syntactic and semantic formalization