@phdthesis{Ritz2013,
  author    = {Ritz, Julia},
  title     = {Discourse-givenness of noun phrases : theoretical and computational models},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-70818},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  year      = {2013},
  abstract  = {This thesis gives formal definitions of discourse-givenness, coreference and reference, and reports on experiments with computational models of discourse-givenness of noun phrases for English and German. Definitions are based on Bach's (1987) work on reference, Kibble and van Deemter's (2000) work on coreference, and Kamp and Reyle's Discourse Representation Theory (1993). For the experiments, the following corpora with coreference annotation were used: MUC-7, OntoNotes and ARRAU for Englisch, and TueBa-D/Z for German. As for classification algorithms, they cover J48 decision trees, the rule based learner Ripper, and linear support vector machines. New features are suggested, representing the noun phrase's specificity as well as its context, which lead to a significant improvement of classification quality.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{DipperGoetzeStedeetal.2004,
  author    = {Dipper, Stefanie and G{\"o}tze, Michael and Stede, Manfred and Wegst, Tillmann},
  title     = {ANNIS},
  series = {Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632},
  journal   = {Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632},
  number    = {1},
  issn      = {1866-4725},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-8432},
  pages     = {245 -- 279},
  year      = {2004},
  abstract  = {In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of our first version of the database "ANNIS" ("ANNotation of Information Structure"). For research based on empirical data, ANNIS provides a uniform environment for storing this data together with its linguistic annotations. A central database promotes standardized annotation, which facilitates interpretation and comparison of the data. ANNIS is used through a standard web browser and offers tier-based visualization of data and annotations, as well as search facilities that allow for cross-level and cross-sentential queries. The paper motivates the design of the system, characterizes its user interface, and provides an initial technical evaluation of ANNIS with respect to data size and query processing.},
  language  = {en}
}
@incollection{HartmannZimmermann2006,
  author    = {Hartmann, Katharina and Zimmermann, Malte},
  title     = {Morphological focus marking in G{\`u}r{\`u}nt{\`u}m (West Chadic)},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19525},
  publisher      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  year      = {2006},
  abstract  = {The paper presents an in-depth study of focus marking in G{\`u}r{\`u}nt{\`u}m, a West Chadic language spoken in Bauchi Province of Northern Nigeria. Focus in G{\`u}r{\`u}nt{\`u}m is marked morphologically by means of a focus marker a, which typically precedes the focus constituent. Even though the morphological focus-marking system of G{\`u}r{\`u}nt{\`u}m allows for a lot of fine-grained distinctions in information structure (IS) in principle, the language is not entirely free of focus ambiguities that arise as the result of conflicting IS- and syntactic requirements that govern the placement of focus markers. We show that morphological focus marking with a applies across different types of focus, such as newinformation, contrastive, selective and corrective focus, and that a does not have a second function as a perfectivity marker, as is assumed in the literature. In contrast, we show at the end of the paper that a can also function as a foregrounding device at the level of discourse structure.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{Kitagawa2007,
  author    = {Kitagawa, Yoshihisa},
  title     = {When we fail to question in Japanese},
  series = {Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632},
  volume    = {9},
  journal   = {Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632},
  editor    = {Ishihara, Shinichiro and Petrova, Svetlana and Schwarz, Anne},
  publisher = {Universit{\"a}tsverlag Potsdam},
  address   = {Potsdam},
  issn      = {1866-4725},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-24481},
  pages     = {29 -- 64},
  year      = {2007},
  abstract  = {When we pay close attention to the prosody of Wh-questions in Japanese, we discover many novel and interesting empirical puzzles that would require us to devise a much finer syntactic component of grammar. This paper addresses the issues that pose some problems to such an elaborated grammar, and offers solutions, making an appeal to the information structure and sentence processing involved in the interpretation of interrogative and focus constructions.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{Ishihara2007,
  author    = {Ishihara, Shinichiro},
  title     = {Intonation of sentences with an NPI},
  series = {Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632},
  volume    = {9},
  journal   = {Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632},
  editor    = {Ishihara, Shinichiro and Petrova, Svetlana and Schwarz, Anne},
  publisher = {Universit{\"a}tsverlag Potsdam},
  address   = {Potsdam},
  issn      = {1866-4725},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-24497},
  pages     = {65 -- 96},
  year      = {2007},
  abstract  = {This paper presents the results of a production experiment on the intonation of sentences containing a negative polarity item (NPI) in Tokyo Japanese. The results show that NPI sentences exhibit a focus intonation: the F₀-peak of the word to which an NPI is attached is raised, while the pitch contour after the NPI-attached word is compressed until the negation. This intonation pattern is parallel to that of wh-question, in which the F₀ of the wh-phrase is raised while the post-wh-contour is compressed until the question particle.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{Gussenhoven2007,
  author    = {Gussenhoven, Carlos},
  title     = {Notions and subnotions in information structure},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19704},
  year      = {2007},
  abstract  = {Three dimensions can be distinguished in a cross-linguistic account of information structure. First, there is the definition of the focus constituent, the part of the linguistic expression which is subject to some focus meaning. Second and third, there are the focus meanings and the array of structural devices that encode them. In a given language, the expression of focus is facilitated as well as constrained by the grammar within which the focus devices operate. The prevalence of focus ambiguity, the structural inability to make focus distinctions, will thus vary across languages, and within a language, across focus meanings.},
  language  = {en}
}
@misc{HoehleWeissenbornKieferetal.2004,
  author    = {H{\"o}hle, Barbara and Weissenborn, J{\"u}rgen and Kiefer, Dorothea and Schulz, Antje and Schmitz, Michaela},
  title     = {Functional elements in infants' speech processing : the role of determiners in the syntactic categorization of lexical elements},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-16285},
  year      = {2004},
  abstract  = {How do children determine the syntactic category of novel words? In this article we present the results of 2 experiments that investigated whether German children between 12 and 16 months of age can use distributional knowledge that determiners precede nouns and subject pronouns precede verbs to syntactically categorize adjacent novel words. Evidence from the head-turn preference paradigm shows that, although 12- to 13-month-olds cannot do this, 14- to 16-month-olds are able to use a determiner to categorize a following novel word as a noun. In contrast, no categorization effect was found for a novel word following a subject pronoun. To understand this difference we analyzed adult child-directed speech. This analysis showed that there are in fact stronger co-occurrence relations between determiners and nouns than between subject pronouns and verbs. Thus, in German determiners may be more reliable cues to the syntactic category of an adjacent novel word than are subject pronouns. We propose that the capacity to syntactically categorize novel words, demonstrated here for the first time in children this young, mediates between the recognition of the specific morphosyntactic frame in which a novel word appears and the word-to-world mapping that is needed to build up a semantic representation for the novel word.},
  language  = {en}
}
@misc{HoehleSchmitzMuelleretal.2006,
  author    = {H{\"o}hle, Barbara and Schmitz, Michaela and M{\"u}ller, Anja and Weissenborn, J{\"u}rgen},
  title     = {The recognition of discontinuous verbal dependencies by German 19-month-olds : evidence for lexical and structural influences on children's early processing capacities},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-16297},
  year      = {2006},
  abstract  = {Recent work has shown that English-learning 18-month-olds can detect the relationship between discontinuous morphemes such as is and -ing in Grandma is always running (Gomez, 2002; Santelmann \& Jusczyk, 1998) but only at a maximum of 3 intervening syllables. In this article we examine the tracking of discontinuous dependencies in children acquiring German. Due to freer word order, German allows for greater distances between dependent elements and a greater syntactic variety of the intervening elements than English does. The aim of this study was to investigate whether factors other than distance may influence the child's capacity to recognize discontinuous elements. Our findings provide evidence that children's recognition capacities are affected not only by distance but also by their ability to linguistically analyze the material intervening between the dependent elements. We speculate that this result supports the existence of processing mechanisms that reduce a discontinuous relation to a local one based on subcategorization relations.},
  language  = {en}
}
@misc{HoehlevandeVijverWeissenborn2006,
  author    = {H{\"o}hle, Barbara and van de Vijver, Ruben and Weissenborn, J{\"u}rgen},
  title     = {Word processing at 19 months and its relation to language performance at 30 months : a retrospective analysis of data from German learning children},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-16302},
  year      = {2006},
  abstract  = {Recent research has shown that the early lexical representations children establish in their second year of life already seem to be phonologically detailed enough to allow differentiation from very similar forms. In contrast to these findings children with specific language impairment show problems in discriminating phonologically similar word forms up to school age. In our study we investigated the question whether there would be differences in the processing of phonological details in normally developing and in children with low language performance in the second year of life. This was done by a retrospective study in which in the processing of phonological details was tested by a preferential looking experiment when the children were 19 months old. At the age of 30 months children were tested with a standardized German test of language comprehension and production (SETK2). The preferential looking data at 19 months revealed an opposite reaction pattern for the two groups: while the children scoring normally in the SETK2 increase their fixations of a pictured object only when it was named with the correct word, children with later low language performance did so only when presented with a phonologically slightly deviant mispronunciation. We suggest that this pattern does not point to a specific deficit in processing phonological information in these children but might be related to an instability of early phonological representations, and/or a generalized problem of information processing as compared to typically developing children.},
  language  = {en}
}
@misc{OttvandeVijverHoehle2006,
  author    = {Ott, Susan and van de Vijver, Ruben and H{\"o}hle, Barbara},
  title     = {The effect of phonotactic constraints in German-speaking children with delayed phonological acquisition : evidence from production of word-initial consonant clusters},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-16316},
  year      = {2006},
  abstract  = {In this study the effect of phonotactic constraints concerning word-initial consonant clusters in children with delayed phonological acquisition was explored. Twelve German-speaking children took part (mean age 5;1). The spontaneous speech of all children was characterized by the regular appearance of the error patterns fronting, e.g., Kuh (cow) → /tu:/, or stopping, e.g., Schaf (sheep) → /ta:f/, which were inappropriate for their chronological age. The children were asked to produce words (picture naming task, word repetition task) with initial consonant clusters, in which the application of the error patterns would violate phonotactic sequence constraints. For instance, if fronting would apply in /kl-/, e.g., Kleid (dress), it would be realized as the phontactically illegal consonant cluster /tl-/. The results indicate that phonotactic constraints affect word production in children with delayed phonological developments. Surprisingly, we found that children with fronting produced the critical consonants correctly significantly more often in word-initial consonant clusters than in words in which they appeared as singleton onsets. In addition, the results provide evidence for a similar developmental trajectory of acquisition in children with typical development and in children with delayed phonological acquisition. Keywords: Children with delayed phonological acquisition, phonotactic constraints, word-initial consonant clusters, fronting, stopping.},
  language  = {en}
}
@book{OPUS4-1329,
  title     = {Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; Working papers of the SFB 632. - Vol. 8},
  editor    = {Ishihara, Shinichiro and Jannedy, Stefanie and Schwarz, Anne},
  publisher = {Universit{\"a}tsverlag Potsdam},
  address   = {Potsdam},
  isbn      = {978-3-939469-72-8},
  issn      = {1866-4725},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-14359},
  publisher      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {230},
  year      = {2007},
  abstract  = {The 8th volume of the working paper series Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS) of the SFB 632 contains a collection of eight papers contributed by guest authors and SFB-members. The first paper on "Biased Questions" is an invited contribution by Nicholas Asher (CNRS, Laboratoire IRIT) \& Brian Reese (University of Texas at Austin). Surveying English tag questions, negative polar questions, and what they term "focus" questions, they investigate the effects of prosody on discourse function and discourse structure and analyze the interaction between prosody and discourse in SDRT (Segmented Discourse Representation Theory). Stefan Hinterwimmer (A2) explores the interpretation of singular definites and universally quantified DPs in adverbially quantified English sentences. He suggests that the availability of a co-varying interpretation is more constrained in the case of universally quantified DPs than in the case of singular definites, because different from universally quantified DPs, co-varying definites are inherently focus-marked. The existence of striking similarities between topic/comment structure and bimanual coordination is pointed out and investigated by Manfred Krifka (A2). Showing how principles of bimanual coordination influence the expression of topic/comment structure beyond spoken language, he suggests that bimanual coordination might have been a preadaptation of the development of Information Structure in human communication. Among the different ways of expressing focus in Foodo, an underdescribed African Guang language of the Kwa family, the marked focus constructions are the central topic of the paper by Ines Fiedler (B1 \& D2). Exploring the morphosyntactic facilities that Foodo has for focalization, she suggests that the two focus markers N and n have developed out of a homophone conjunction. Focus marking in another scarcely documented African tone language, the Gur language Konkomba, is treated by Anne Schwarz (B1 \& D2). Comparing the two alleged focus markers l{\´e} and l{\´a} of the language, she argues that l{\´e} is better interpreted as a syntactic device rather than as a focus marker and shows that this analysis is corroborated by parallels in related languages. The reflexes of Information Structure in four different European languages (French, German, Greek and Hungarian) are compared and validated by Sam Hellmuth \& Stavros Skopeteas (D2). The production data was collected with selected materials of the Questionnaire on Information Structure (QUIS) developed at the SFB. The results not only allow for an evaluation of the current elicitation paradigms, but also help to identify potentially fruitful venues of future research. Frank K{\"u}gler, Stavros Skopeteas (D2) \& Elisabeth Verhoeven (University of Bremen) give an account of the encoding of Information Structure in Yucatec Maya, a Mayan tone language spoken on the Yucatecan peninsula in Mexico. The results of a production experiment lead them to the conclusion that focus is mainly expressed by syntax in this language. Stefanie Jannedy (D3) undertakes an instrumental investigation on the expressions and interpretation of focus in Vietnamese, a language of the Mon-Khmer family contrasting six lexical tones. The data strongly suggests that focus in Vietnamese is exclusively marked by prosody (intonational emphasis expressed via duration, f0 and amplitude) and that different focus conditions can reliably be recovered. This volume offers insights into current work conducted at the SFB 632, comprising empirical and theoretical aspects of Information Structure in a multitude of languages. Several of the papers mine field work data collected during the first phase of the SFB and explore the expression of Information Structure in tone and non-tone languages from various regions of the world.},
  language  = {en}
}
@incollection{Kiss2007,
  author    = {Kiss, Katalin {\´E}.},
  title     = {Topic and focus},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19639},
  publisher      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  year      = {2007},
  abstract  = {The paper explicates the notions of topic, contrastive topic, and focus as used in the analysis of Hungarian. Based on distributional criteria, topic and focus are claimed to represent distinct structural positions in the left periphery of the Hungarian sentence, associated with logical rather than discourse functions. The topic is interpreted as the logical subject of predication. The focus is analyzed as a derived main predicate, specifying the referential content of the set denoted by the backgrounded post-focus section of the sentence. The exhaustivity associated with the focus and the existential presupposition associated with the background are shown to be properties following from their specificational predication relation.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{Tomioka2007,
  author    = {Tomioka, Satoshi},
  title     = {Information Structure as information-based partition},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19657},
  year      = {2007},
  abstract  = {While the Information Structure (IS) is most naturally interpreted as 'structure of information', some may argue that it is structure of something else, and others may object to the use of the word 'structure'. This paper focuses on the question of whether the informational component can have structural properties such that it can be called 'structure'. The preliminary conclusion is that, although there are some vague indications of structurehood in it, it is perhaps better understood to be a representation that encodes a finite set of information-based partitions, rather than structure.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{Abusch2007,
  author    = {Abusch, Dorit},
  title     = {Focus presuppositions},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19663},
  year      = {2007},
  abstract  = {This paper reviews notions related to focus and presupposition and addresses the hypothesis that focus triggers an existential presupposition. Presupposition projection behavior in certain examples appears to favor a presuppositional analysis of focus. It is argued that these examples are open to a different analysis using givenness theory. Overall, the analysis favors a weak semantics for focus not including an existential presupposition.},
  language  = {en}
}
@incollection{Selkirk2007,
  author    = {Selkirk, Elisabeth},
  title     = {Contrastive focus, givenness and the unmarked status of "Discourse-New"},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19670},
  publisher      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  year      = {2007},
  abstract  = {New evidence is provided for a grammatical principle that singles out contrastive focus (Rooth 1996; Truckenbrodt 1995) and distinguishes it from discourse-new "informational" focus. Since the prosody of discourse-given constituents may also be distinguished from discourse-new, a three-way distinction in representation is motivated. It is assumed that an F-feature marks just contrastive focus (Jackendoff 1972, Rooth 1992), and that a G-feature marks discoursegiven constituents (F{\´e}ry and Samek-Lodovici 2006), while discoursenew is unmarked. A crucial argument for G-marking comes from second occurrence focus (SOF) prosody, which arguably derives from a syntactic representation where SOF is both F-marked and G-marked. This analysis relies on a new G-Marking Condition specifying that a contrastive focus may be G-marked only if the focus semantic value of its scope is discourse-given, i.e. only if the contrast itself is given.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{Zimmermann2007,
  author    = {Zimmermann, Malte},
  title     = {Contrastive focus},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19688},
  year      = {2007},
  abstract  = {The article puts forward a discourse-pragmatic approach to the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. It is argued that occurrences of focus that are treated in terms of 'contrastive focus', 'kontrast' (Vallduv{\´i} \& Vilkuna 1998) or 'identificational focus' ({\´E}. Kiss 1998) in the literature should not be analyzed in familiar semantic terms like introduction of alternatives or exhaustivity. Rather, an adequate analysis must take into account discourse-pragmatic notions like hearer expectation or discourse expectability of the focused content in a given discourse situation. The less expected a given content is judged to be for the hearer, relative to the Common Ground, the more likely a speaker is to mark this content by means of special grammatical devices, giving rise to emphasis.},
  language  = {en}
}
@incollection{Jannedy2007,
  author    = {Jannedy, Stefanie},
  title     = {Prosodic focus in Vietnamese},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19478},
  publisher      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  year      = {2007},
  abstract  = {This paper reports on pilot work on the expression of Information Structure in Vietnamese and argues that Focus in Vietnamese is exclusively expressed prosodically: there are no specific focus markers, and the language uses phonology to express intonational emphasis in similar ways to languages like English or German. The exploratory data indicates that (i) focus is prosodically expressed while word order remains constant, (ii) listeners show good recoverability of the intended focus structure, and (iii) that there is a trading relationship between several phonetic parameters (duration, f0, amplitude) involved to signal prosodic (acoustic) emphasis.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{Schwarz2007,
  author    = {Schwarz, Anne},
  title     = {The particles l{\´e} and l{\´a} in the grammar of Konkomba},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19449},
  year      = {2007},
  abstract  = {The paper investigates focus marking devices in the scarcely documented North-Ghanaian Gur language Konkomba. The two particles l{\´e} and l{\´a} occur under specific focus conditions and are therefore regarded as focus markers in the sparse literature. Comparing the distribution and obligatoriness of both alleged focus markers however, I show that one of the particles, l{\´e}, is better analyzed as a connective particle, i.e. as a syntactic rather than as a genuine pragmatic marker, and that comparable syntactic focus marking strategies for sentence-initial constituents are also known from related languages.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{Fiedler2007,
  author    = {Fiedler, Ines},
  title     = {Focus expressions in Foodo},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19428},
  year      = {2007},
  abstract  = {This paper aims at presenting different ways of expressing focus in Foodo, a Guang language. We can differentiate between marked and unmarked focus strategies. The marked focus expressions are first syntactically characterized: the focused constituent is in sentence-initial position and is second always marked obligatorily by a focus marker, which is nɩ for non-subjects and N for subjects. Complementary to these structures, Foodo knows an elliptic form consisting of the focused constituent and a predication marker gɛ́. It will be shown that the two focus markers can be analyzed as having developed out of the homophone conjunction nɩ and that the constraints on the use of the focus markers can be best explained by this fact.},
  language  = {en}
}
@book{OPUS4-1195,
  title     = {Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; Working papers of the SFB 632 - Vol. 5},
  editor    = {Ishihara, Shinichiro and Schmitz, Michaela and Schwarz, Anne},
  publisher = {Universit{\"a}tsverlag Potsdam},
  address   = {Potsdam},
  issn      = {1866-4725},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-13047},
  publisher      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {221},
  year      = {2006},
  abstract  = {In this paper we compare the behaviour of adverbs of frequency (de Swart 1993) like usually with the behaviour of adverbs of quantity like for the most part in sentences that contain plural definites. We show that sentences containing the former type of Q-adverb evidence that Quantificational Variability Effects (Berman 1991) come about as an indirect effect of quantification over situations: in order for quantificational variability readings to arise, these sentences have to obey two newly observed constraints that clearly set them apart from sentences containing corresponding quantificational DPs, and that can plausibly be explained under the assumption that quantification over (the atomic parts of) complex situations is involved. Concerning sentences with the latter type of Q-adverb, on the other hand, such evidence is lacking: with respect to the constraints just mentioned, they behave like sentences that contain corresponding quantificational DPs. We take this as evidence that Q-adverbs like for the most part do not quantify over the atomic parts of sum eventualities in the cases under discussion (as claimed by Nakanishi and Romero (2004)), but rather over the atomic parts of the respective sum individuals.},
  language  = {en}
}