Children learn to distinguish registers for different roles: talk as child versus as adult, as girl versus boy, as parent versus child, as teacher, as doctor, marking each “voice” with intonation, vocabulary, and speech acts. They learn to mark gender and status with each role; what counts as polite, how to address different people, how to mark membership in a speech community (e.g., family, school, tennis players, chess players), and how to convey specific goals in conversation. They reply on experts for new word meanings and identify some adults as reliable sources of such information. They mark information as reliable or as second-hand, through use of evidentials. They adapt their speech to each addressee and take into account the common ground relevant to each from as young as 1;6 on. They keep track of what is given and what new, making use of articles (a versus the), and moving from definite noun phrases (new) to pronouns (given). They learn to be persuasive, and persistent, bargaining in their negotiations. They give stage directions in pretend play. And they start to use figurative language. They learn how questions work at school. And they learn how to tell stories.

The author first defines the following notions of information structure: focus (vs. background), given (vs. new), and topic (vs. comment). He then goes on to show how these notions are reflected in the prosodic systems of Slavic languages. Focus in all Slavic languages is reflected in prosodic prominence governed by a stress-focus correspondence defined by the author. In general, ‘given’ is realized outside the sentence stress. Focus does not have an obligatory prosodic reflex in Slavic languages.

How are we to make truthful statements, depictions or communications about a changing world? A fact is not an actuality but a statement about actuality; data are not given but captured and communicated; communication modifies the actuality it describes. We have many tools at our disposal – journalistic and essayistic, photographic, scientific – with which to name and depict things that are too big, too small, too fast or too slow for human perception. This chapter suggests that they share two fundamental procedures: abstraction and anecdote. The former culls large-scale dynamics from massive collections of data; the latter seizes on unique instances of the confluence of forces. Can an investigation of truth-practices in stories, reports, diagrams and images give us tools to redirect the changes we know we are experiencing but for which the means of expression seem suddenly ineffectual?

This chapter reviews the syntactic and prosodic correlates of information structure in Germanic languages. The chapter starts with an introduction to the information structural notions: focus, topic, and givenness related to the way information is stored in human memory and organized in communication. The effect of information structure on prosody in these languages can be felt in several ways: pitch accent addition because of focus, pitch accent deletion because of givenness, topicalization because of topic. In syntax, the effects are also numerous: scrambling, a series of leftward movements: topicalization, passivization, dative construction, object-shift, and a series of rightward movements: extraposition, right-dislocation, heavy NP-shift, afterthought. Pronominalization and ellipsis are the results of givenness. At the end of the chapter, focus-sensitive particles (or “association with focus”) like exclusive only, additive also and scalar even, are shortly mentioned. Germanic languages show a wealth of effects, but they also differ among each other in subtle ways.

Chapter 3 turns to the fundamental metaphysical concept in Kant, the concept of the ‘really’ (not just logically) unconditioned, and to the conditioning relations between objects that speculative metaphysics tracks. Kant’s Rational Sources Account (his argument that the sources of speculative metaphysics lie in reason itself) rests on the claim that the logical use of reason naturally leads us to accept a principle he calls the “supreme principle of pure reason.” In this chapter, we will try to clarify this principle by asking what Kant, in the context of the Supreme Principle, means by ‘given,’ by ‘the conditioned’ and its ‘conditions,’ what it means for something to be ‘unconditioned,’ and why Kant thinks the series of subordinated conditions is supposed to be unconditioned in this sense. Finally, we will ask how that principle relates to the Principle of Sufficient Reason.