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 - CHAP A1 - Kimmelmann, Vadim T1 - Doubling in RSL and NGT : a pragmatic account0F* N2 - In this paper, doubling in Russian Sign Language and Sign Language of the Netherlands is discussed. In both sign languages different constituents (including verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and whole clauses) can be doubled. It is shown that doubling in both languages has common functions and exhibits a similar structure, despite some differences. On this basis, a unified pragmatic explanation for many doubling phenomena on both the discourse and the clause-internal levels is provided, namely that the main function of doubling both in RSL and NGT is foregrounding of the doubled information. KW - Russian Sign Language KW - Sign Language of the Netherlands KW - doubling KW - Information Structure KW - foregrounding Y1 - 2013 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-66102 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Pfeil, Simone A1 - Genzel, Susanne A1 - Kügler, Frank T1 - Empirical investigation of focus and exhaustivity in Akan JF - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 N2 - It has been observed for many African languages that focussed subjects have to appear outside of their syntactic base position, as opposed to focussed objects, which can remain in-situ. This is known as subjectobject asymmetry of focus marking, which Fiedler et al. (2010) claim to hold also for Akan. Genzel (2013), on the other hand, argues that Akan does not exhibit a subject-object focus asymmetry. A questionnaire study and a production experiment were carried out to investigate whether focussed subjects may indeed be realized in-situ in Akan. The results suggest that (i) focussed subjects do not have to be obligatorily realized ex-situ, and that (ii) the syntactic preference for the realization of a focussed subject highly depends on exhaustivity. KW - Akan KW - focus KW - subjects KW - exhaustivity KW - in-situ Y1 - 2015 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-83774 SN - 1614-4708 SN - 1866-4725 IS - 19 SP - 87 EP - 109 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Akuoko Duah, Reginald T1 - Exhaustive Focus Marking in Akan JF - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 N2 - This paper reopens the discussion on focus marking in Akan (Kwa, Niger-Congo) by examining the semantics of the so-called focus marker in the language. It is shown that the so-called focus marker expresses exhaustivity when it occurs in a sentence with narrow focus. The study employs four standard tests for exhaustivity proposed in the literature to examine the semantics of Akan focus constructions (Szabolsci 1981, 1994; É. Kiss 1998; Hartmann and Zimmermann 2007). It is shown that although a focused entity with the so-called focus marker nà is interpreted to mean ‘only X and nothing/nobody else,’ this meaning appears to be pragmatic. KW - Akan KW - focus marker KW - cleft KW - exhaustivity KW - ex situ KW - in situ KW - subject/non-subject asymmetry Y1 - 2015 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-83748 SN - 1614-4708 SN - 1866-4725 IS - 19 SP - 1 EP - 28 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Genzel, Susanne A1 - Kügler, Frank T1 - How to elicit semi-spontaneous focus realizations with specific tonal patterns JF - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 N2 - This article presents a situation description production experiment investigating the interaction between syntax and information structure in Akan, a tone language that belongs to the Kwa branch of the Niger- Congo family spoken in Ghana. Information structure was elicited via context questions that put the object in narrow informational focus or narrow corrective focus while controlling for the tonal structure of the target word. Contrary to the prediction that corrective focus is marked by fronting and morphological marking of the focused constituent the data suggest that the in-situ strategy is the preferred one. KW - Akan KW - information structure KW - syntax Y1 - 2011 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-49749 SN - 1614-4708 SN - 1866-4725 IS - 13 SP - 77 EP - 102 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Röhr, Christine Tanja T1 - Information status and prosody : production and perception in German0F* N2 - In a production experiment and two follow-up perception experiments on read German we investigated the (de-)coding of discourse-new, inferentially and textually accessible and given discourse referents by prosodic means. Results reveal that a decrease in the referent’s level of givenness is reflected by an increase in its prosodic prominence (expressed by differences in the status and type of accent used) providing evidence for the relevance of different intermediate types of information status between the poles given and new. Furthermore, perception data indicate that the degree of prosodic prominence can serve as the decisive cue for decoding a referent’s level of givenness. KW - prosody KW - information status KW - discourse referent KW - degree of givenness KW - cognitive activation KW - prominence KW - pitch accent KW - perception Y1 - 2013 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-66116 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Karvovskaya, Lena A1 - Kimmelman, Vadim A1 - Röhr, Christine Tanja A1 - Stavropoulou, Pepi A1 - Titov, Elena A1 - van Putten, Saskia ED - Balbach, Maria ED - Benz, Lena ED - Genzel, Susanne ED - Grubic, Mira ED - Renans, Agata ED - Schalowski, Sören ED - Stegenwallner, Maja ED - Zeldes, Amir T1 - Information structure : empirical perspectives on theory N2 - The papers collected in this volume were presented at a Graduate/Postgraduate Student Conference with the title Information Structure: Empirical Perspectives on Theory held on December 2 and 3, 2011 at Potsdam-Griebnitzsee. The main goal of the conference was to connect young researchers working on information structure (IS) related topics and to discuss various IS categories such as givenness, focus, topic, and contrast. The aim of the conference was to find at least partial answers to the following questions: What IS categories are necessary? Are they gradient/continuous? How can one deal with optionality or redundancy? How are IS categories encoded grammatically? How do different empirical methods contribute to distinguishing between the influence of different IS categories on language comprehension and production? To answer these questions, a range of languages (Avatime, Chinese, German, Ishkashimi, Modern Greek, Old Saxon, Russian, Russian Sign Language and Sign Language of the Netherlands) and a range of phenomena from phonology, semantics, and syntax were investigated. The presented theories and data were based on different kinds of linguistic evidence: syntactic and semantic fieldwork, corpus studies, and phonological experiments. The six papers presented in this volume discuss a variety of IS categories, such as emphasis and contrast (Stavropoulous, Titov), association with focus and topics (van Putten, Karvovskaya), and givenness and backgrounding (Kimmelmann, Röhr). T3 - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 - 17 KW - Fokus KW - Topik KW - Informationsstruktur KW - Fokussensitivität KW - Givenness KW - Backgrounding KW - Focus KW - Topic KW - Information Structure KW - Focus-sensitivity KW - Givenness KW - Backgrounding Y1 - 2013 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-64804 ER - TY - BOOK A1 - Wiese, Heike A1 - Freywald, Ulrike A1 - Mayr, Katharina T1 - Kiezdeutsch as a test case for the interaction between grammar and information structure N2 - This paper deals with Kiezdeutsch, a way of speaking that emerged among adolescents in multiethnic urban neighbourhoods of Germany. We show that, in Kiezdeutsch, we find evidence for both grammatical reduction and new developments in the domain of information structure, and hypothesise that this points to a systematic interaction between grammar and information structure, between weakened grammatical constraints and a more liberal realisation of information-structural preferences. We show that Kiezdeutsch can serve as an interesting test case for such an interaction, that this youth language is a multiethnolect, that is, a new variety that is spoken by speakers from a multitude of ethnic backgrounds, including German, and forms a dynamic linguistic system of its own, thus allowing for systematic developments on grammatical levels and their interfaces with extragrammatical domains. T3 - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 - 12 KW - interface between grammar and information structure KW - focus particle KW - left periphery KW - multiethnolect KW - acceptability study Y1 - 2009 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-38376 ER - TY - BOOK A1 - Grubic, Mira A1 - Genzel, Susanne A1 - Kügler, Frank T1 - Linguistic Fieldnotes I: Information Structure in different African Languages N2 - This is the 13th issue of the working paper series Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS) of the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 632. It is the first part of a series of Linguistic Fieldnote issues which present data collected by members of different projects of the SFB during fieldwork on various languages or dialects spoken worldwide. This part of the Fieldnote Series is dedicated to data from African languages. It contains contributions by Mira Grubic (A5) on Ngizim, and Susanne Genzel & Frank Kügler (D5) on Akan. The papers allow insights into various aspects of the elicitation of formal correlates of focus and related phenomena in different African languages investigated by the SFB in the second funding phase, especially in the period between 2007 and 2010. T3 - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 - 13 KW - Ngizim KW - Akan KW - information structure KW - syntax Y1 - 2010 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-49684 ER - TY - BOOK A1 - Schwarz, Anne A1 - Fiedler, Ines T1 - Linguistic Fieldnotes III: Information Structure in Gur and Kwa Languages N2 - This is the 16th issue of the working paper series Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS) of the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 632. The present issue continues the series on Linguistic Fieldnotes providing data elicited and documented by different members of the Sonderforschungsbereich 632. Here, the focus is placed on primary linguistic data from Gur and Kwa languages, collected and prepared by Anne Schwarz, former investigator in Project B1 and D2, and Ines Fiedler, former investigator in Project B1 and D2 and current member of Project B7 at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. T3 - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 - 16 Y1 - 2011 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-51094 ER -