Information Structure: Theoretical and Empirical Aspects

✍ Scribed by Anita Steube (editor)

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2004
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 384
• Series: Language, Context and Cognition; 1
• Edition: Reprint 2013
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The first volume of the series is devoted to the subjects "information structure" and "contrast". The working hypothesis is that, apart from the use of lexical indication, the expression of contrast vs. correction is primarily carried by the intonation contour as a means for indicating scope and focus in negating constructions. The papers in this volume proceed from the premise that the information structure is preformed conceptually, and on articulation in the dynamic context is then portioned and linearized, mapped onto the syntactic representation via the semantic representation, and finally realized intonationally. The findings are partly based on neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic experiments. 

✦ Table of Contents

Introduction
Degrees of Contrast and the Topic-Focus Articulation
Information Structure and Modular Grammar
Negative Descriptions of Events: Semantic and Conceptual Aspects of Sentence Negation and its Relevance for Information Structure
Two Types of Contrastive Topics?
Information Structure – Two-dimensionally Explicated
Topic Constraints in the German Middlefield
Contrastive Word Stress in Vedic Endo- and Exocentric Compounds
Towards a Scalar Notion of Information Structural Markedness
Prosody in Dialogues and Single Sentences: How Prosody can influence Speech Perception
On the Independence of Information Structural Processing from Prosody
The Prosodic Pattern of Contrastive Accent in Russian
Focus Structure and the Processing of Word Order Variations in German
Intonational Patterns in Contrast and Concession
Prosody in Contrast: Prosodic Distinction of Contrast and Correction Readings of Polish Adversative Coordinate Structures
Portraits of the Authors
Index