Information Structure: Theoretical, Typological, and Experimental Perspectives

✍ Scribed by Malte Zimmermann, Caroline Féry

• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 429
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents......Page 6
Notes on contributors......Page 8
Abbreviations and symbols......Page 12
1 Introduction......Page 18
Part I: Topic and Focus......Page 30
2 Second occurrence focus and Relativized Stress F......Page 32
3 How focus and givenness shape prosody......Page 53
4 Structural focus and exhaustivity......Page 81
5 The interpretation of topical indefinites as direct and indirect aboutness topics......Page 106
6 Contrastive topics operate on speech acts......Page 132
7 Biased questions, intonation, and discourse......Page 156
Part II: Cross-Linguistic Variation and Diachronic Change......Page 192
8 Towards a typology of focus realization......Page 194
9 Focus in Aghem......Page 223
10 Subject focus in West African languages......Page 251
11 Information structure and OV order......Page 275
12 Information structure and unmarked word order in (Older) Germanic......Page 299
Part III: Experimental and Psycholinguistic Approaches......Page 322
13 Effects of givenness and constraints on free word order......Page 324
14 Investigating effects of structural and information-structural factors on pronoun resolution......Page 349
15 Given and new information in spatial statements......Page 371
References......Page 392
H......Page 424
T......Page 425
Z......Page 426
F......Page 427
O......Page 428
W......Page 429

✦ Subjects

Языки и языкознание;Лингвистика;Психолингвистика;