Lena Karvovskaya, Vadim Kimmelman, Christine Tanja Röhr, Pepi Stavropoulou, Elena Titov, Saskia van Putten

• 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 fromThe 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).…