TY  - JOUR
A1  - Krifka, Manfred
T1  - Basic notions of information structure
N2  - This article takes stock of the basic notions of Information Structure (IS). It first provides a general characterization of IS — following Chafe (1976) — within a communicative model of Common Ground(CG), which distinguishes between CG content and CG management. IS is concerned with those features of language that concern the local CG. Second, this paper defines and discusses the notions of Focus (as indicating alternatives) and its various uses, Givenness (as indicating that a denotation is already present in the CG), and Topic (as specifying what a statement is about). It also proposes a new notion, Delimitation, which comprises contrastive topics and frame setters, and indicates that the current conversational move does not entirely satisfy the local communicative needs. It also points out that rhetorical structuring partly belongs to IS.
KW  - Information Structure
KW  - Focus
KW  - Topic
KW  - Givenness
KW  - Contrast
Y1  - 2007
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19603
SN  - 978-3-939469-88-9
SN  - 1614-4708
SN  - 1866-4725
SP  - 13
EP  - 55
PB  - Universitätsverlag Potsdam
CY  - Potsdam
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Wierzba, Marta
A1  - Fanselow, Gisbert
T1  - Factors influencing the acceptability of object fronting in German
JF  - The journal of comparative Germanic linguistics
N2  - In this paper, we address some controversially debated empirical questions concerning object fronting in German by a series of acceptability rating studies. We investigated three kinds of factors: (i) properties of the subject (given/new, pronoun/full DP), (ii) emphasis, (iii) register. The first factor is predicted to play a crucial role by models in which object fronting possibilities are limited by prosodic properties. Two experiments provide converging evidence for a systematic effect of this factor: we find that the relative acceptability of object fronting across subjects that require an accent (new DPs) is lower than across deaccentable subjects (pronouns and given DPs). Other models predict object fronting across full phrases (but not across pronouns) to be limited to an emphatic interpretation. This prediction is also borne out, suggesting that both types of models capture an empirically valid generalization and can be seen as complementing each other rather than competing with each other. Finally, we find support for the view that informal register facilitates object fronting. In sum, our experiments contribute to clarifying the empirical basis concerning a phenomenon influenced by a range of interacting factors. This, in turn, informs theoretical approaches to the prefield position and helps to identify factors that need to be carefully controlled in this field of research.
KW  - German
KW  - Object fronting
KW  - Prefield
KW  - Givenness
KW  - Emphasis
KW  - Register
KW  - Experiments
KW  - Acceptability
Y1  - 2020
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-020-09113-1
SN  - 1383-4924
SN  - 1572-8552
VL  - 23
IS  - 1
SP  - 77
EP  - 124
PB  - Springer
CY  - New York
ER  -