LINGUIST List 18.968

Fri Mar 30 2007

Calls: General Ling/Germany; Applied Ling,Comp Ling/Bulgaria

Editor for this issue: Ania Kubisz <anialinguistlist.org>

Directory         1.    Carsten Breul, Contrastive Information Structure Analysis
         2.    Mathias Schulze, Workshop on NLP for Educational Resources
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Message 1: Contrastive Information Structure Analysis
Date: 30-Mar-2007
From: Carsten Breul <breuluni-wuppertal.de>
Subject: Contrastive Information Structure Analysis


Full Title: Contrastive Information Structure Analysis Short Title: CISA

Date: 18-Mar-2008 - 19-Mar-2008 Location: Wuppertal, Germany Contact Person: Carsten Breul Meeting Email: cisa-08uni-wuppertal.de>; one of these should be anonymous and one should include your name, affiliation and e-mail address at the top of the page, directly below the title. All abstracts will be reviewed anonymously by members of the advisory board.

Rationale: The notion of information structure underlying this conference refers to the grammatical properties of sentences that encode ''a speaker's assumptions concerning the hearer's state of mind at the time of an utterance'' (Lambrecht 1994). More specifically, what is relevant here is the addressee's state of mind as concerns their mental representation of the discourse. The communicator's aim and task in uttering a sentence is to supply information, or to be 'relevant' in Sperber & Wilson's (1986/1995) sense, in order to effect a modification of the addressee's representation of the discourse. Information structure thus conceived comprises two basic types of grammatical properties: (a) Properties relating to the communicator's assumptions about whether a given entity or proposition is known to the addressee and whether he is aware of it at the time of the utterance. Grammatical categories associated with such properties include (in)definiteness, (non-)specificity, mood, pronominal/zero versus full lexical coding, sentence versus embedded clause. (b) Properties relating to the communicator's assumptions about vacant information slots recently created in the process of the addressee's representation of the discourse. Information being propositional in nature, such slots have to be filled by expressions capable of denoting a proposition at the given point of the discourse, i.e. by complete or elliptical sentences. Moreover, in order to be 'relevant', in Sperber & Wilson's (1986/1995) sense, these expressions have to provide clues that help the addressee to determine which recently created information slot is to be filled by the utterance. The grammatical categories associated with such aspects of sentence grammar have been subsumed under the notion of focus structure. They include concepts such as background and focus, theme and rheme, sentence versus predicate versus argument focus (or thetic versus categorical versus identificational sentences). Intonation plays an important role in signalling assumptions of the kinds mentioned in (a) and (b) as well. Independently of the question of how intonation relates to syntax, it is clear that intonational properties may express categories of information structure instead of or in combination with morpho-syntactic properties. Contrastive, or comparative, analyses can be found in numerous works on various aspects of information structure (see e.g. Lambrecht 1994, Schwabe & Winkler (eds.) 2007). However, the contrastive approach has seldom provided the explicit and guiding perspective in this field (for recent works that do take an explicitly contrastive/comparative approach, see e.g. Doherty 2005, Drubig 2003, Frey 2005, Hasselgård & Johansson & Behrens & Fabricius-Hansen (eds.) 2002).

References: Doherty, M. 2005. ''Topic-worthiness in German and English''. Linguistics 43: 181-206. Drubig, H. B. 2003. ''Toward a typology of focus and focus constructions''. Linguistics 41: 1-50. Frey, W. 2005. ''Pragmatic properties of certain German and English left peripheral constructions''. Linguistics 43: 89-129. Hasselgård, H. & Johansson, S. & Behrens, B. & Fabricius-Hansen, C. (eds.). 2002. Information structure in a cross-linguistic perspective. Amsterdam & New York. Lambrecht, K. 1994. Information structure and sentence form: Topic, focus, and the mental representation of discourse referents. Cambridge et al. Schwabe, K. & Winkler, S. (eds.) (2007). On information structure, meaning and form: Generalizations across languages. Amsterdam & Philadelphia. Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. 1986/1995. Relevance: Communication and cognition. 2nd edn. Oxford & Cambridge (MA): Blackwell.
Message 2: Workshop on NLP for Educational Resources
Date: 30-Mar-2007
From: Mathias Schulze <mschulzeuwaterloo.ca>
Subject: Workshop on NLP for Educational Resources



Full Title: Workshop on NLP for Educational Resources Short Title: NLPER07

Date: 26-Sep-2007 - 26-Sep-2007 Location: Borovetz, Bulgaria Contact Person: Mathias Schulze Schulze Meeting Email: nlper07gmail.com