On Information Structure, Meaning and Form

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Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9789027233646
Total Pages : 584 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (336 download)

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Book Synopsis On Information Structure, Meaning and Form by : Kerstin Schwabe

Download or read book On Information Structure, Meaning and Form written by Kerstin Schwabe and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of articles offers a new and compelling perspective on the interface connecting syntax, phonology, semantics and pragmatics. At the core of this volume is the hypothesis that information structure represents the common interface of these grammatical components. Information structure is investigated here from different theoretical viewpoints yielding typologically relevant information and structural generalizations. In the volume's introductory chapter, the editors identify two central approaches to information structure: the formal and the interpretive view. The remainder of the book is organized accordingly. The first part examines information structure and grammar, concentrating on generalizations across languages. The second part investigates information structure and pragmatics, concentrating on clause structure and context. Through concrete analyses of topic, focus, and related phenomena across different languages, the contributors add new and convincing evidence to the research on information structure.

Information Structure and Sentence Form

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Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1316582418
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (165 download)

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Book Synopsis Information Structure and Sentence Form by : Knud Lambrecht

Download or read book Information Structure and Sentence Form written by Knud Lambrecht and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-11-13 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do speakers of all languages use different grammatical structures under different communicative circumstances to express the same idea? Professor Lambrecht explores the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the linguistic and extra-linguistic context in which it is used. His analysis is based on the observation that the structure of a sentence reflects a speaker's assumption about the hearer's state of knowledge and consciousness at the time of the utterance. This relationship between speaker assumptions and formal sentence structure is governed by rules and conventions of grammar, in a component called 'information structure'. Four independent but interrelated categories are analysed: presupposition and assertion, identifiability and activation, topic, and focus.

On Information Structure, Meaning and Form

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Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027292647
Total Pages : 570 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (272 download)

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Book Synopsis On Information Structure, Meaning and Form by : Kerstin Schwabe

Download or read book On Information Structure, Meaning and Form written by Kerstin Schwabe and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007-03-08 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of articles offers a new and compelling perspective on the interface connecting syntax, phonology, semantics and pragmatics. At the core of this volume is the hypothesis that information structure represents the common interface of these grammatical components. Information structure is investigated here from different theoretical viewpoints yielding typologically relevant information and structural generalizations. In the volume's introductory chapter, the editors identify two central approaches to information structure: the formal and the interpretive view. The remainder of the book is organized accordingly. The first part examines information structure and grammar, concentrating on generalizations across languages. The second part investigates information structure and pragmatics, concentrating on clause structure and context. Through concrete analyses of topic, focus, and related phenomena across different languages, the contributors add new and convincing evidence to the research on information structure.

The Expression of Information Structure

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Author :
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
ISBN 13 : 311026160X
Total Pages : 476 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (12 download)

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Book Synopsis The Expression of Information Structure by : Manfred Krifka

Download or read book The Expression of Information Structure written by Manfred Krifka and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-08-31 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Information structure deals with the linguistic forms and techniques that support the integration of what is said into the current informational and attentional state of the addressee. This shows in categories like topic-comment structuring, focus to highlight expressions, marking of givenness and of presupposed information, and ways to indicate that the information provided is restricted. The book relates infor-mation structure to theoretical models of grammar, to computation and modelling and brings together what is known about the expression of information structure in human language with regard to its empirical investigation, its psycholinguistic aspects and the acquisition of information structure. Since the need to integrate what is said into the informational and attentional state of the addressee is central to all human communication, it is not surprising that all natural languages have developed devices to express information structural cate-gories. To illustrate this, the book also provides concrete and theory independent descriptions of the information structural encoding strategies of individual languages of different types . The book can be used as a textbook appropriate for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses; it also provides information for linguists that are not specialists in the field.

Comparative and Contrastive Studies of Information Structure

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Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027287848
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (272 download)

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Book Synopsis Comparative and Contrastive Studies of Information Structure by : Carsten Breul

Download or read book Comparative and Contrastive Studies of Information Structure written by Carsten Breul and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010-09-09 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents original comparative and contrastive research into various aspects of information structure (topic, focus, contrastivity, givenness, anaphoricity) as well as into forms and structures whose realisation depends on information-structural factors (clefts, dislocations, reflexives, null subjects, prosodic features, interrogatives) in a number of different languages (Catalan, English, French, Georgian, German, Hebrew, Hungarian). Each contribution emphasises differences or commonalities between the languages under investigation with respect to the realisation of information structural categories or with respect to the information structural implications of a given form or structure. The specific comparative-contrastive perspective of the volume makes a substantial contribution towards a better understanding of language specific and universal aspects of information structure. It raises significant questions and provides solutions for the formal representation and the functional properties of information structural categories.

Diachronic Studies on Information Structure

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Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
ISBN 13 : 3110227479
Total Pages : 231 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (12 download)

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Book Synopsis Diachronic Studies on Information Structure by : Gisella Ferraresi

Download or read book Diachronic Studies on Information Structure written by Gisella Ferraresi and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010-08-31 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last few years a lively discussion on information packaging has arisen, where traditional dichotomies Theme/Rheme, Topic/Comment and Focus/Background have been taken up again and partly reinterpreted. The discussion is mainly being held in syntax, but also in the fields of semantics and pragmatics. Some remarkable progress has been made especially in Focus phonology. Even if the role of information conveying and information packaging in the Indoeuropean languages was hinted at as early as in the classical studies of the Neogrammarians, this field has remained neglected in today's historical linguistics. This volume tries to partly cover this lack with a sample of papers which offer a various range of new empirical data analyzed from the point of view of information structure. The novelty of the papers consists in the modern theoretical perspective from which the data are analyzed and in the various phenomena considered, which range from the rise of clitic elements to word order change and verb movement. Editorial board Dr. habil. Kai Alter (Newcastle University Medical School) Prof. Dr. Ulrike Demske (Universität des Saarlandes) Prof. Dr. Ewald Lang (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Prof. Dr. Rosemarie Lühr (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena) Prof. Dr. Thomas Pechmann (Universität Leipzig) Prof. em. Dr. Anita Steube (Universität Leipzig)

Contrasts and Positions in Information Structure

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139536230
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (395 download)

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Book Synopsis Contrasts and Positions in Information Structure by : Ivona Kučerová

Download or read book Contrasts and Positions in Information Structure written by Ivona Kučerová and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Information structure, or the way the information in a sentence is 'divided' into categories such as topic, focus, comment, background, and old versus new information, is one of the most widely debated topics in linguistics. This volume incorporates exciting work on the relationship between syntax and information structure. The contributors are united in rejecting accounts that assume designated syntactic positions associated with specific information-structural interpretations, and aim instead to derive information-structural conditions on word order and other phenomena from the way syntax and syntax-external systems interact. Beyond this shared aim, the authors of the various chapters advocate a number of approaches, based on different types of data (syntactic, semantic, phonological/phonetic) from a range of languages. The book is aimed at specialists in syntax and/or information structure, as well as students and linguists in related fields keen to familiarise themselves with current issues in this fascinating area of research.

Information Structure

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Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191610100
Total Pages : 430 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (916 download)

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Book Synopsis Information Structure by : Malte Zimmermann

Download or read book Information Structure written by Malte Zimmermann and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-10-29 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book leading scholars provide state-of-the-art overviews of approaches to the formal expression of information structure in natural language and its interaction with general principles of human cognition and communication. They present critical accounts of current understanding of how aspects of grammar, such as prosody, syntax, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics, interact in the packing and unpacking of information in communication. They also look at the psycholinguistics behind the production and perception of information-structural categories. The book reflects the advances in recent research on all central aspects of the subject, including concepts of focus versus background, topic versus comment, and given versus new, and the kinds of inferences required to make sense of different combinations of words, syntax, intonation, and context. The chapters include typological and diachronic perspectives on information structure. Taken as a whole the book demonstrates the productive value of combining theoretical and experimental approaches.

The Syntax of Information-Structural Agreement

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Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 9027259739
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (272 download)

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Book Synopsis The Syntax of Information-Structural Agreement by : Johannes Mursell

Download or read book The Syntax of Information-Structural Agreement written by Johannes Mursell and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this research monograph, Johannes Mursell discusses the syntactic impact of information-structural features on agreement. So far, the syntactic contribution of this type of feature has mostly been reduced to movement of topics or foci clause-initial position. Here, the author looks at a different phenomenon, syntactic agreement, and how this process can be dependent on information-structural properties. Based partly on original fieldwork from a typologically diverse set of languages, including Tagalog, Swahili, and Lavukaleve, it is argued that for most areas for which information-structural features have been discussed, it is possible to find cases where these features influence phi-feature agreement. The analysis is then extended to cases of Association with Focus, which does not involve phi-features but can still be accounted for with agreement of information-structural features. The book achieves two main goals: first it provides a uniform analysis for different constructions in unrelated languages. Second, it also gives a new argument that information-structural features should be treated as genuine syntactic features.

On the Role of Contrast in Information Structure

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Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110986590
Total Pages : 270 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (19 download)

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Book Synopsis On the Role of Contrast in Information Structure by : Jorina Brysbaert

Download or read book On the Role of Contrast in Information Structure written by Jorina Brysbaert and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-06-04 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In research on Information Structure, there is an ongoing discussion about the role of contrast. While most linguists consider contrast to be compatible with both focus and topic, some argue that it is an autonomous IS category. Contrast has been shown to be encoded by different linguistic means, such as specific morphemes, adverbials, clefts, prosodic cues. Hence, this concept is also related to other domains, in particular morphosyntax and prosody. The precise way in which they interact is however not yet entirely clear. Moreover, from a methodological point of view, the identification and annotation of contrast in corpora is not straightforward. This volume provides a selection of articles discussing the definition of contrast, the importance of distinguishing different types of contrast, the use of several encoding strategies, and the annotation of contrast in corpora using the Question Under Discussion Model. The contributions offer data on English, French, French Belgian Sign Language, German, Hindi, Italian and Spanish.

Information-Structural Perspectives on Discourse Particles

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Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 9027261466
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (272 download)

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Book Synopsis Information-Structural Perspectives on Discourse Particles by : Pierre-Yves Modicom

Download or read book Information-Structural Perspectives on Discourse Particles written by Pierre-Yves Modicom and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2020-03-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The articles collected in this volume offer new perspectives into the relevance of notions such as topic, antitopic, contrastive topic, focus, verum focus and theticity for the analysis of the syntax and semantics of modal particles, sentence-final particles and other medial, sentential and illocutive particles. This book addresses three great questions in a variety of languages ranging from Japanese to Mohawk, including Basque, French, German, Italian, Kazakh, Spanish and Turkish, with some insights from English and Russian. The first question is the role played by information-structural strategies such as left dislocations, clefts or the morphological marking of focus in the rise of discourse particles. In the second part, papers are concerned with the relevance of information structure for the study of polysemic and polyfunctional discourse particles. Finally, the contribution of particles to the determination of the information-structural profile of the clause is examined, as well as their role in the information-structural specification of illocutionary types. Language-specific papers alternate with comparative approaches in order to show how newer insights on information structure can help resolve some of the classical issues of the linguistic research on particles.

Semantics - Sentence and Information Structure

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Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110589869
Total Pages : 554 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (15 download)

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Book Synopsis Semantics - Sentence and Information Structure by : Paul Portner

Download or read book Semantics - Sentence and Information Structure written by Paul Portner and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Read this book to get a deeper understanding of a wide range of semantics research on complex sentences and meaning in discourse. These in-depth articles from leading names in their fields cover the core concepts of sentential semantics such as tense, modality, conditionality, propositional attitudes, scope, negation, and coordination. The highly cited material, covers questions, imperatives, copular clauses, and existential sentences. It also includes essential research on sentence types, and explains central concepts in the theory of information structure and discourse structure, such as topics, cohesion and coherence, accessibility and discourse particles.

Information Structure and Agreement

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Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027255806
Total Pages : 383 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (272 download)

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Book Synopsis Information Structure and Agreement by : María Victoria Camacho Taboada

Download or read book Information Structure and Agreement written by María Victoria Camacho Taboada and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consists of thirteen contributions that focuses on the trends of information structure and agreement, couched in the present developments of Minimalism, Cartography, and Optimality. In this book, chapters deal with notion of agreement and its role in syntax of specific constructions such as applicatives and correlatives.

Information Structure in Spoken Arabic

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Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135968403
Total Pages : 283 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (359 download)

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Book Synopsis Information Structure in Spoken Arabic by : Jonathan Owens

Download or read book Information Structure in Spoken Arabic written by Jonathan Owens and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores speakers’ intentions, and the structural and pragmatic resources they employ, in spoken Arabic – which is different in many essential respects from literary Arabic. Based on new empirical findings from across the Arabic world this book elucidates the many ways in which context and the goals and intentions of the speaker inform and constrain linguistic structure in spoken Arabic. This is the first book to provide an in-depth analysis of information structure in spoken Arabic, which is based on language as it is actually used, not on normatively-given grammar. Written by leading experts in Arabic linguistics, the studies evaluate the ways in which relevant parts of a message in spoken Arabic are encoded, highlighted or obscured. It covers a broad range of issues from across the Arabic-speaking world, including the discourse-sensitive properties of word order variation, the use of intonation for information focussing, the differential role of native Arabic and second languages to encode information in a codeswitching context, and the need for cultural contextualization to understand the role of "disinformation" structure. The studies combine a strong empirical basis with methodological and theoretical issues drawn from a number of different perspectives including pragmatic theory, language contact, instrumental prosodic analysis and (de-)grammaticalization theory. The introductory chapter embeds the project within the deeper Arabic grammatical tradition, as elaborated by the eleventh century grammarian Abdul Qahir al-Jurjani. This book provides an invaluable comprehensive introduction to an important, yet understudied, component of spoken Arabic.

The Syntax-Information Structure Interface

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Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 1614512051
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (145 download)

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Book Synopsis The Syntax-Information Structure Interface by : Timothy Gupton

Download or read book The Syntax-Information Structure Interface written by Timothy Gupton and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2014-10-24 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is quite remarkable that, after over a half-century of research in generative grammar, there is still uncertainty and debate surrounding the analysis of preverbal subjects in a number of null-subject languages. The implications of this debate are far-reaching for generative theory: if preverbal subjects are analyzed as non-arguments, it calls into question the proposed universality of the EPP (as in e.g. Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 1998), as well as its associated features and feature-strengths. Galician, spoken in the northwest of Spain, is an under-documented Romance language within the generative paradigm. In this book,the authordetails an experimental program for establishing clausal word order appropriateness and preferences in a variety of information structure contexts, while informing theoretical debate on preverbal subjects. The experimental methodology and information structure assumptions employed create several testable predictions. The statistical data suggest that Galician is a predominantly SVO language and that preverbal subjects behave like canonical subjects, and not CLLD constituents. The empirical data discussed inform the modified model of the preverbal field thatthe authorproposes for Galician, which takes into account a number of recent analyses of Western Iberian Romance clausal phenomena such as the enclisis-proclisis divide, topicalization, focalization, and recomplementation.

When Data Challenges Theory

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Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 9027258155
Total Pages : 315 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (272 download)

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Book Synopsis When Data Challenges Theory by : Davide Garassino

Download or read book When Data Challenges Theory written by Davide Garassino and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a critical appraisal of the tension between theory and empirical evidence in research on information structure. The relevance of ‘unexpected’ data taken into account in the last decades, such as the well-known case of non-focalizing cleft sentences in Germanic and Romance, has increasingly led us to give more weight to explanations involving inferential reasoning, discourse organization and speakers’ rhetorical strategies, thus moving away from ‘sentence-based’ perspectives. At the same time, this shift towards pragmatic complexity has introduced new challenges to well-established information-structural categories, such as Focus and Topic, to the point that some scholars nowadays even doubt about their descriptive and theoretical usefulness. This book brings together researchers working in different frameworks and delving into cross-linguistic as well as language-internal variation and language contact. Despite their differences, all contributions are committed to the same underlying goal: appreciating the relation between linguistic structures and their context based on a firm empirical grounding and on theoretical models that are able to account for the challenges and richness of language use.

Architecture of Topic

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Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 1501504487
Total Pages : 440 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (15 download)

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Book Synopsis Architecture of Topic by : Valéria Molnár

Download or read book Architecture of Topic written by Valéria Molnár and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-08-19 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains innovative papers that target the linguistic status of topic at the interface between grammar and discourse. The purpose of the volume is to discuss the universal properties of topics and, at the same time, to document the range of discourse-semantic and grammatical variation within this phenomenon in European languages. The volume is structured accordingly: (i) theoretical foundations of topicality in grammar and discourse; (ii) discourse-semantic correlates of topicality; (iii) variation in the grammatical (external and internal) encoding of topicality; (iv) topics from the diachronic perspective. The articles take different perspectives, including contrastive studies of modern languages, studies on diachronic development, and typological generalizations. They also take into consideration various types of empirical data – introspective data, semi-spontaneously produced data, experimental data and language corpora. The articles in this volume show that the concept of topic is necessary for the description and explanation of a number of discourse-semantic phenomena. They present a state of the art account of the architecture of topic while making recent research on the phenomenon accessible to a wider readership.