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Quantifiers canonically attach to nouns or noun phrases as modifiers to specify the amount or number of the entity expressed by the noun. However, it has been observed that quantifiers can be positioned outside of the noun phrase. These so-called floating quantifiers (FQs) exhibit intriguing syntactic and semantic characteristics. On the one hand, they appear to have a closerelationship with a noun; semantically they quantify a noun in the same way as non-floating quantifiers, and quite often they exhibit agreement with the noun. On the other hand, their phrase structure distribution is very similar to that of VP-adverbs. In this paper, we argue that the distribution of FQs is constrained not purely by syntax, but also by information structure. We show that FQs play a focus role whereas modified nouns are reference-oriented topic expressions. Building upon Dalrymple and Nikolaeva's (2011) recent proposal, we formulate the interaction between syntactic, semantic and information structure features of FQs within LFG's projection architecture.
This paper presents a Synchronous Tree Adjoining Grammar (STAG) account of Information Structure, whereby Givenness-marking requires a link between nodes on a syntactic tree and LF nodes whose interpretation is supplied by a contextually determined set of Given semantic objects. By hypothesis, the interpretation of linked nodes bypasses a default interpretation principle that requires pragmatic reasoning to disambiguate elements and enrich semantic material. Thus, interpreting Given elements requires less cognitive effort than Focused elements. This, combined with some established insights from Game-theoretic pragmatics, yields empirical advantages over more traditional semantic/pragmatic analyses of equal simplicity.
This paper hypothesizes that transfer-based machine translation systems can be improved by encoding information structure in both the source and target grammars, and preserving information structure in the transfer stage. We explore how information structure can be represented within the HPSG/MRS formalism (Pollard and Sag, 1994; Copestake et al., 2005) and how it can help refine multilingual MT. Building upon that framework, we provide a sample translation between English and Japanese and check the feasibility of the proposals in small-scale translation systems built with the HPSG/MRS-based LOGON MT infrastructure (Oepen et al., 2007). Our experiment shows the information structure-based MT system that we propose in this paper reduces the number of translations 75.71% for Japanese and 80.23% for Korean. The dramatic reductions in the number of translations is expected to make a contribution to our HPSG/MRS-based MT in terms of latency as well as accuracy.
My objective here is to assess the relevance of information structural notions for analyzing subject inversion in French. Subject inversion is not a unified phenomenon. In fact, there are three distinct constructions featuring an inverted subject. I show that the sentences do not have the same informational potential (the type of focus-ground articulation they are compatible with) depending on the construction they abide by. I propose a contextual factor – the informational solidarity between the verb and its first argument – to account for those differences. Then, I show that the three constructions share a common feature that pertains to a completely different dimension: the perspective chosen to describe the situation. I adopt Langacker's notion of absolute construal to characterize it. Finally, I present another common feature: the blocking of the referential anchoring of the referent of indefinite and partitive NPs.
In this article we show how the HPSG approach to information structure of De Kuthy (2002) and De Kuthy and Meurers (2003) can be extended to capture givenness (Schwarzschild, 1999) and make the right predictions for so-called deaccenting of given information, a widespread phenomenon not previously dealt with in HPSG.
Based on Krifka (1992) and de Kuthy (2000), this paper develops an architecture for complex topic-comment structures in HPSG and applies it to predicate fronting in English with the goal of capturing the insights of Ward (1988) on this construction. We argue that predicate fronting is a distributed constructional form consisting of an auxiliary occurring in a predicate preposing phrase. The use of predicate preposing is a function of a combination of simultaneous constraints on its theme structure, its background-focus distribution, and its presuppositional structure. It is shown that these constraints can be made explicit within the HPSG architecture developed here.
This paper provides a constraint-based account of information-prosody correspondence within the HPSG framework. The starting point of the paper is Klein's (2000) account of prosodic constituency in HPSG. However, it departs from the standard syntactocentric architecture of grammar, and adopts a grammar design in which syntax, phonology, and information structure are generated in parallel, with all three applying to a common list of domain objects. It is shown that this theoretical architecture elegantly captures many of the various constraints that have been shown to hold in classical views of grammar.
This paper is concerned with such concepts as topic, focus and cognitive status of discourse referents, which have been included under the label information structure (alternatively information status), as they are related in some sense to the distribution of given and new information. It addresses the question of which information structural properties are best accounted for by grammatical constraints and which can be attributed to non-linguistic constraints on the way information is processed and communicated. Two logically independent senses of given-new information are distinguished, one referential and the other relational. I discuss some examples of linguistic phenomena that pertain to each of these different senses and show that both are linguistically relevant and must be represented in the grammar. I also argue that phenomena related to both senses have pragmatic effects that do not have to be represented in the grammar since they result from interaction of the language system with general pragmatic principles that constrain inferential processes involved in language production and understanding.
The paper investigates a complex word order phenomenon in German and the interaction of syntax and information structure it exemplifies: the occurrence of subjects as part of a fronted non-finite constituent and particularly the so-called definiteness effect excluding (many) definite subjects from this position. We explore the connection between focus projection and the partial fronting cases and show that it is the subject of those verbs which allow their subject to be the focus exponent that can be included as part of a fronted verbal constituent. In combination with the observation by Webelhuth (1990) that fronted verbal constituents need to be focused, this provides a natural explanation of the definiteness effect in terms of the information structure requirements in these sentences. Interestingly, the generally ignored exceptions to the definiteness effect are predicted by our analysis; we show that they involve definite noun phrases which can bear focus, which allows them to be part of a fronted verbal constituent. Finally, building on the integrated grammatical architecture provided in De Kuthy (2002), we formulate an HPSG theory which captures the interaction of constraints from syntax, information structure and intonation.
This paper investigates a particular word order phenomenon in German, the occurrence of discontinuous NPs (which we refer to as the NP-PP split construction) in order to probe the division of labor between the syntactic analysis and discourse constraints on this construction. We argue that some of the factors which previous literature has tried to explain in terms of syntactic restrictions are in fact derivable from discourse factors. Building on these insights, we show how an information structure component can be integrated into an HPSG account of the phenomenon.