TY - JOUR A1 - Staudacher, Peter T1 - Plato on nature (φύσις) and convention (συνθήκη) JF - Of trees and birds. A Festschrift for Gisbert Fanselow KW - Festschrift KW - Informationsstruktur KW - Linguistik KW - Morphologie KW - Syntax KW - festschrift KW - information structure KW - linguistics KW - morphology KW - syntax Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-433193 SN - 978-3-86956-457-9 SP - 395 EP - 411 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Dipper, Stefanie A1 - Götze, Michael A1 - Stede, Manfred A1 - Wegst, Tillmann T1 - ANNIS BT - a linguistic database for exploring information structure JF - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 N2 - 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. Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-8432 SN - 1866-4725 SN - 1614-4708 IS - 1 SP - 245 EP - 279 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kitagawa, Yoshihisa ED - Ishihara, Shinichiro ED - Petrova, Svetlana ED - Schwarz, Anne T1 - When we fail to question in Japanese JF - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 N2 - 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. KW - focus KW - (implicit) prosody KW - information structure KW - processing KW - Wh-question Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-24481 SN - 1866-4725 SN - 1614-4708 VL - 9 SP - 29 EP - 64 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ishihara, Shinichiro ED - Ishihara, Shinichiro ED - Petrova, Svetlana ED - Schwarz, Anne T1 - Intonation of sentences with an NPI JF - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 N2 - 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. KW - Japanese KW - negative polarity item (NPI) KW - focus intonation KW - wh-question Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-24497 SN - 1866-4725 SN - 1614-4708 VL - 9 SP - 65 EP - 96 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gussenhoven, Carlos T1 - Notions and subnotions in information structure N2 - 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. KW - corrective focus KW - contrastive focus KW - informational focus KW - focus ambiguity KW - focus type KW - focus meaning Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19704 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Tomioka, Satoshi T1 - Information Structure as information-based partition N2 - 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. KW - Partition KW - Topic KW - Recursivity KW - Second Occurrence Focus Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19657 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Abusch, Dorit T1 - Focus presuppositions N2 - 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. KW - focus KW - presupposition KW - alternative semantics presupposition projection KW - givenness Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19663 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Zimmermann, Malte T1 - Contrastive focus N2 - 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’ (Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998) or ‘identificational focus’ (É. 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. KW - contrastive focus KW - emphasis KW - discourse expectability Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19688 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kügler, Frank A1 - Skopeteas, Stavros A1 - Verhoeven, Elisabeth T1 - Encoding information structure in Yucatec Maya BT - on the interplay of prosody and syntax N2 - The aim of this paper is to outline the means for encoding information structure in Yucatec Maya. Yucatec Maya is a tone language, displaying a three-fold opposition in the tonal realization of syllables. From the morpho-syntactic point of view, the grammar of Yucatec Maya contains morphological (topic affixes, morphological marking of out-of-focus predicates) and syntactic (designated positions) means to uniquely specify syntactic constructions for their information structure. After a descriptive overview of these phenomena, we present experimental evidence which reveals the impact of the nonavailability of prosodic alternatives on the choice of syntactic constructions in language production. KW - cleft constructions KW - lexical tone KW - topic affixes KW - verb-initial cleft constructions KW - verb-initial Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19469 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hellmuth, Sam A1 - Skopeteas, Stavros T1 - Information structure in linguistic theory and in speech production : validation of a Cross-Linguistic data set N2 - The aim of this paper is to validate a dataset collected by means of production experiments which are part of the Questionnaire on Information Structure. The experiments generate a range of information structure contexts that have been observed in the literature to induce specific constructions. This paper compares the speech production results from a subset of these experiments with specific claims about the reflexes of information structure in four different languages. The results allow us to evaluate and in most cases validate the efficacy of our elicitation paradigms, to identify potentially fruitful avenues of future research, and to highlight issues involved in interpreting speech production data of this kind. KW - cleft constructions KW - clitic doubling KW - de-accenting KW - focus position KW - presentational constructions KW - scrambling KW - topicalization Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19450 SN - 978-3-939469-72-8 SN - 1866-4725 SN - 1614-4708 SP - 141 EP - 186 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schwarz, Anne T1 - The particles lé and lá in the grammar of Konkomba N2 - The paper investigates focus marking devices in the scarcely documented North-Ghanaian Gur language Konkomba. The two particles lé and lá 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, lé, 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. KW - morphological focus marking KW - syntactic focus marking KW - conjunction KW - topic-comment KW - Konkomba Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19449 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Fiedler, Ines T1 - Focus expressions in Foodo N2 - 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. KW - focus constructions KW - scope of focus KW - focus types KW - Foodo Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19428 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kügler, Frank T1 - Do we know the answer? BT - variation in yes-no-question intonation JF - Linguistics in Potsdam N2 - Content: 1. Introduction 2. The corpus 2.1 Subjects 2.2 Recordings 2.3 Data processing 2.4 Materials 3. Intonation in Upper Saxon German yes-no-questions 4. Intonational variation and information structure 5. Conclusions and discussion Y1 - 2003 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-32424 SN - 1616-7392 SN - 1864-1857 IS - 21 SP - 9 EP - 29 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Jannedy, Stefanie A1 - Mendoza-Denton, Norma T1 - Structuring information through gesture and intonation JF - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 N2 - Face-to-face communication is multimodal. In unscripted spoken discourse we can observe the interaction of several "semiotic layers", modalities of information such as syntax, discourse structure, gesture, and intonation. We explore the role of gesture and intonation in structuring and aligning information in spoken discourse through a study of the co-occurrence of pitch accents and gestural apices. Metaphorical spatialization through gesture also plays a role in conveying the contextual relationships between the speaker, the government and other external forces in a naturally-occurring political speech setting. KW - gesture KW - intonation KW - spoken discourse KW - narrative structure KW - political speech KW - affect Y1 - 2005 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-8774 SN - 1866-4725 SN - 1614-4708 IS - 3 SP - 199 EP - 244 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kasimir, Elke T1 - Question-answer test and givenness BT - some question marks JF - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 N2 - In order to investigate the empirical properties of focus, it is necessary to diagnose focus (or: "what is focused") in particular linguistic examples. It is often taken for granted that the application of one single diagnostic tool, the so-called question-answer test, which roughly says that whatever a question asks for is focused in the answer, is a fool-proof test for focus. This paper investigates one example class where such uncritical belief in the question-answer test has led to the assumption of rather complex focus projection rules: in these examples, pitch accent placement has been claimed to depend on certain parts of the focused constituents being given or not. It is demonstrated that such focus projection rules are unnecessarily complex and in turn require the assumption of unnecessarily complicated meaning rules, not to speak of the difficulties to give a precise semantic/pragmatic definition of the allegedly involved givenness property. For the sake of the argument, an alternative analysis is put forward which relies solely on alternative sets following Mats Rooth's work, and avoids any recourse to givenness. As it turns out, this alternative analysis is not only simpler but also makes in a critical case the better predictions. KW - focus KW - givenness Y1 - 2005 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-8698 SN - 1866-4725 SN - 1614-4708 IS - 3 SP - 1 EP - 52 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Teich, Elke A1 - Fankhauser, Peter T1 - Exploring lexical patterns in text BT - lexical cohesion analysis with WordNet JF - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 N2 - We present a system for the linguistic exploration and analysis of lexical cohesion in English texts. Using an electronic thesaurus-like resource, Princeton WordNet, and the Brown Corpus of English, we have implemented a process of annotating text with lexical chains and a graphical user interface for inspection of the annotated text. We describe the system and report on some sample linguistic analyses carried out using the combined thesaurus-corpus resource. Y1 - 2005 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-8685 SN - 1866-4725 SN - 1614-4708 IS - 2 SP - 129 EP - 145 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Weskott, Thomas T1 - Stop bashing givenness! BT - A note on Elke Kasimir's "Questions-Answers Test and Givenness" JF - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 N2 - Elke Kasimir’s paper (in this volume) argues against employing the notion of Givenness in the explanation of accent assignment. I will claim that the arguments against Givenness put forward by Kasimir are inconclusive because they beg the question of the role of Givenness. It is concluded that, more generally, arguments against Givenness as a diagnostic for information structural partitions should not be accepted offhand, since the notion of Givenness of discourse referents is (a) theoretically simple, (b) readily observable and quantifiable, and (c) bears cognitive significance. KW - givenness Y1 - 2005 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-8718 SN - 1866-4725 SN - 1614-4708 IS - 3 SP - 53 EP - 62 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Fanselow, Gisbert T1 - Cyclic phonology-syntax-interaction BT - movement to first position in German JF - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 N2 - This paper investigates the nature of the attraction of XPs to clauseinitial position in German (and other languages). It argues that there are two different types of preposing. First, an XP can move when it is attracted by an EPP-like feature of Comp. Comp can, however, also attract elements that bear the formal marker of some semantic or pragmatic (information theoretic) function. This second type of movement is driven by the attraction of a formal property of the moved element. It has often been misanalysed as “operator” movement in the past. Japanese wh-questions always exhibit focus intonation (FI). Furthermore, the domain of FI exhibits a correspondence to the wh-scope. I propose that this phonology-semantics correspondence is a result of the cyclic computation of FI, which is explained under the notion of Multiple Spell-Out in the recent Minimalist framework. The proposed analysis makes two predictions: (1) embedding of an FI into another is possible; (2) (overt) movement of a wh-phrase to a phase edge position causes a mismatch between FI and wh-scope. Both predictions are tested experimentally, and shown to be borne out. KW - topicalization KW - focus movement KW - operator movement KW - A-bar-movement Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-8264 SN - 1866-4725 SN - 1614-4708 IS - 1 SP - 1 EP - 42 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ishihara, Shinichiro T1 - Prosody by phase BT - evidence from focus intonation wh-scope correspondence in Japanese JF - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 N2 - Japanese wh-questions always exhibit focus intonation (FI). Furthermore, the domain of FI exhibits a correspondence to the wh-scope. I propose that this phonology-semantics correspondence is a result of the cyclic computation of FI, which is explained under the notion of Multiple Spell-Out in the recent Minimalist framework. The proposed analysis makes two predictions: (1) embedding of an FI into another is possible; (2) (overt) movement of a wh-phrase to a phase edge position causes a mismatch between FI and wh-scope. Both predictions are tested experimentally, and shown to be borne out. KW - Japanese KW - wh-question KW - prosody KW - focus intonation KW - wh-scope KW - cyclicity KW - phase KW - Multiple Spell-Out Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-8391 SN - 1866-4725 SN - 1614-4708 IS - 1 SP - 77 EP - 119 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Féry, Caroline A1 - Herbst, Laura ED - Ishihara, Shinichiro ED - Schmitz, Michaela ED - Schwarz, Anne T1 - German sentence accent revisited JF - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 N2 - Results of a production experiment on the placement of sentence accent in German are reported. The hypothesis that German fulfills some of the most widely accepted rules of accent assignment— predicting focus domain integration—was only partly confirmed. Adjacency between argument and verb induces a single accent on the argument, as recognized in the literature, but interruption of this sequence by a modifier often induces remodeling of the accent pattern with a single accent on the modifier. The verb is rarely stressed. All models based on linear alignment or adjacency between elements belonging to a single accent domain fail to account for this result. A cyclic analysis of prosodic domain formation is proposed in an optimality-theoretic framework that can explain the accent pattern. Japanese wh-questions always exhibit focus intonation (FI). Furthermore, the domain of FI exhibits a correspondence to the wh-scope. I propose that this phonology-semantics correspondence is a result of the cyclic computation of FI, which is explained under the notion of Multiple Spell-Out in the recent Minimalist framework. The proposed analysis makes two predictions: (1) embedding of an FI into another is possible; (2) (overt) movement of a wh-phrase to a phase edge position causes a mismatch between FI and wh-scope. Both predictions are tested experimentally, and shown to be borne out. KW - Prosody KW - Syntax KW - Information structure Y1 - 2004 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-8273 SN - 1614-4708 SN - 1866-4725 IS - 1 SP - 43 EP - 75 ER -