Information Structure: Theoretical, Typological, and Experimental Perspectives

by Malte Zimmermann, Caroline Fery

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199570959
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	12/20/2009
Series:	Oxford Linguistics
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Malte Zimmermann and Caroline Féry are Professors of Linguistics at the University of Potsdam. Professor Zimmermann's research interests are in quantification and focus. His published work includes articles in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory and Natural Language Semantics. Professor Féry has published extensively in all aspects of phonology and phonological theory, including the role of prosody and intonation in information structure. She is the co-editor of Gradience in Grammar (OUP 2006).

Table of Contents

1. Introduction, Malte Zimmermann and Caroline Féry
Part I Topic and Focus
2. Second Occurrence Focus and Relativized Stress F, Mats Rooth
3. How Focus and Givenness Shape Prosody, Caroline Féry and Shinichiro Ishihara
4. Structural Focus and Exhaustivity, Katalin É Kiss
5. The Interpretation of Topical Indefinites as Direct and Indirect Aboutness Topics, Cornelia Endriss and Stefan Hinterwimmer
6. Contrastive Topics Operate on Speech Acts, Satoshi Tomioka
7. Biased Questions, Intonation, and Discourse, Brian Reese and Nicholas Asher
Part II Cross-linguistic Variation and Diachronic Change
8. Towards a Typology of Focus Realization, Daniel Büring
9. Focus in Aghem, Larry M. Hyman and Maria Polinsky
10. Subject Focus in West African Languaegs, Ines Fiedler, Katharina Hartmann, Brigitte Reineke, Anne Schwarz, and Malte Zimmermann
11. Information Structure and OV Order, Thorbjörg Hróarsdóttir
12. Information Structure and Unmarked Word Order in (Older) Germanic, Roland Hinterhölzl
Part III Experimental and Psycholinguistic Approaches to Information Structure
13. Effects of Givenness and Constraints on Free Word order, Stavros Skopeteas and Gisbert Fanselow
14. Investigating Effects on Structural and Information-Structural Factors on Pronoun Resolution, Elsi Kaiser
15. Given and New Information in Spatial Statements, Robin Hörnig and Thomas Weskott