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Focus presuppositions
(2007)
This paper reviews notions related to focus and presupposition and addresses the hypothesis that focus triggers an existential presupposition. Presupposition projection behavior in certain examples appears to favor a presuppositional analysis of focus. It is argued that these examples are open to a different analysis using givenness theory. Overall, the analysis favors a weak semantics for focus not including an existential presupposition.
Focus expressions in Foodo
(2007)
This paper aims at presenting different ways of expressing focus in Foodo, a Guang language. We can differentiate between marked and unmarked focus strategies. The marked focus expressions are first syntactically characterized: the focused constituent is in sentence-initial position and is second always marked obligatorily by a focus marker, which is [...] for non-subjects and N for subjects. Complementary to these structures, Foodo knows an elliptic form consisting of the focused constituent and a predication marker [...]. It will be shown that the two focus markers can be analyzed as having developed out of the homophone conjunction n[...] and that the constraints on the use of the focus markers can be best explained by this fact.
Focus asymmetries in Bura
(2008)
This article presents the central aspects of the focus system of Bura (Chadic), which exhibits a number of asymmetries: Grammatical focus marking is obligatory only with focused subjects, where focus is marked by the particle án following the subject. Focused subjects remain in situ and the complement of án is a regular VP. With nonsubject foci, án appears in a cleft-structure between the fronted focus constituent and a relative clause. We present a semantically unified analysis of focus marking in Bura that treats the particle as a focusmarking copula in T that takes a property-denoting expression (the background) and an individual-denoting expression (the focus) as arguments. The article also investigates the realization of predicate and polarity focus, which are almost never marked. The upshot of the discussion is that Bura shares many characteristic traits of focus marking with other Chadic languages, but it crucially differs in exhibiting a structural difference in the marking of focus on subjects and non-subject constituents.
Focus and tone
(2006)
Tone is a distinctive feature of the lexemes in tone languages. The information-structural category focus is usually marked by syntactic and morphological means in these languages, but sometimes also by intonation strategies. In intonation languages, focus is marked by pitch movements, which are also perceived as tone. The present article discusses prosodic focus marking in these two language types.
This paper discusses how focus change s prosodic structure in Tokyo Japanese. It is generally believed that focus blocks the intonational process of downstep and causes a pitch reset. This paper presents experimental evidence against this traditional view by looking at the prosodic behavior of Wh words, which receive focus lexically in Japanese as in other languages. It is demonstrated, specifically, that the focused Wh element does not block downstep although it receives a much higher pitch than its preceding element. This suggests that presence of lexical focus does not trigger pitch reset in Japanese.
The present study examines native and nonnative perceptual processing of semantic information conveyed by prosodic prominence. Five groups of German learners of English each listened to one of 5 experimental conditions. Three conditions differed in place of focus accent in the sentence and two conditions were with spliced stimuli. The experiment condition was presented first in the learners’ L1 (German) and then in a similar set in the L2 (English). The effect of the accent condition and of the length and position of the target in the sentence was evaluated in a probe recognition task. In both the L1 and L2 tasks there was no significant effect in any of the five focus conditions. Target position and target word length had an effect in the L1 task. Word length did not affect accuracy rates in the L2 task. For probe recognition in the L2, word length and the position of the target interacted with the focus condition.
We present a system for the linguistic exploration and analysis of lexical cohesion in English texts. Using an electronic thesaurus-like resource, Princeton WordNet, and the Brown Corpus of English, we have implemented a process of annotating text with lexical chains and a graphical user interface for inspection of the annotated text. We describe the system and report on some sample linguistic analyses carried out using the combined thesaurus-corpus resource.
The aim of this paper is to outline the means for encoding information structure in Yucatec Maya. Yucatec Maya is a tone language, displaying a three-fold opposition in the tonal realization of syllables. From the morpho-syntactic point of view, the grammar of Yucatec Maya contains morphological (topic affixes, morphological marking of out-of-focus predicates) and syntactic (designated positions) means to uniquely specify syntactic constructions for their information structure. After a descriptive overview of these phenomena, we present experimental evidence which reveals the impact of the nonavailability of prosodic alternatives on the choice of syntactic constructions in language production.
In this paper we review the current state of research on the issue of discourse structure (DS) / information structure (IS) interface. This field has received a lot of attention from discourse semanticists and pragmatists, and has made substantial progress in recent years. In this paper we summarize the relevant studies. In addition, we look at the issue of DS/ISinteraction at a different level—that of phonetics. It is known that both information structure and discourse structure can be realized prosodically, but the issue of phonetic interaction between the prosodic devices they employ has hardly ever been discussed in this context. We think that a proper consideration of this aspect of DS/IS-interaction would enrich our understanding of the phenomenon, and hence we formulate some related research-programmatic positions.
This paper investigates the nature of the attraction of XPs to clauseinitial position in German (and other languages). It argues that there are two different types of preposing. First, an XP can move when it is attracted by an EPP-like feature of Comp. Comp can, however, also attract elements that bear the formal marker of some semantic or pragmatic (information theoretic) function. This second type of movement is driven by the attraction of a formal property of the moved element. It has often been misanalysed as “operator” movement in the past.
Contrastive focus
(2007)
The article puts forward a discourse-pragmatic approach to the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. It is argued that occurrences of focus that are treated in terms of "contrastive focus", "kontrast" (Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998) or "identificational focus" (É. Kiss 1998) in the literature should not be analyzed in familiar semantic terms like introduction of alternatives or exhaustivity. Rather, an adequate analysis must take into account discourse-pragmatic notions like hearer expectation or discourse expectability of the focused content in a given discourse situation. The less expected a given content is judged to be for the hearer, relative to the Common Ground, the more likely a speaker is to mark this content by means of special grammatical devices, giving rise to emphasis.
New evidence is provided for a grammatical principle that singles out contrastive focus (Rooth 1996; Truckenbrodt 1995) and distinguishes it from discourse-new “informational” focus. Since the prosody of discourse-given constituents may also be distinguished from discourse-new, a three-way distinction in representation is motivated. It is assumed that an F-feature marks just contrastive focus (Jackendoff 1972, Rooth 1992), and that a G-feature marks discoursegiven constituents (Féry and Samek-Lodovici 2006), while discoursenew is unmarked. A crucial argument for G-marking comes from second occurrence focus (SOF) prosody, which arguably derives from a syntactic representation where SOF is both F-marked and G-marked. This analysis relies on a new G-Marking Condition specifying that a contrastive focus may be G-marked only if the focus semantic value of its scope is discourse-given, i.e. only if the contrast itself is given.
This article takes stock of the basic notions of Information Structure (IS). It first provides a general characterization of IS — following Chafe (1976) — within a communicative model of Common Ground (CG), which distinguishes between CG content and CG management. IS is concerned with those features of language that concern the local CG. Second, this paper defines and discusses the notions of Focus (as indicating alternatives) and its various uses, Givenness (as indicating that a denotation is already present in the CG), and Topic (as specifying what a statement is about). It also proposes a new notion, Delimitation, which comprises contrastive topics and frame setters, and indicates that the current conversational move does not entirely satisfy the local communicative needs. It also points out that rhetorical structuring partly belongs to IS.
The material reported on in this paper is part of a set of experiments in which the role of Information Structure on L2 processing of words is tested. Pitch and duration of 4 sets of experimental material in German and English are measured and analyzed in this paper. The well-known finding that accent boosts duration and pitch is confirmed. Syntactic and lexical means of marking focus, however, do not give the duration and the pitch of a word an extra boost.
In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of our first version of the database "ANNIS" (ANNotation of Information Structure). For research based on empirical data, ANNIS provides a uniform environment for storing this data together with its linguistic annotations. A central database promotes standardized annotation, which facilitates interpretation and comparison of the data. ANNIS is used through a standard web browser and offers tier-based visualization of data and annotations, as well as search facilities that allow for cross-level and cross-sentential queries. The paper motivates the design of the system, characterizes its user interface, and provides an initial technical evaluation of ANNIS with respect to data size and query processing.
The paper presents a novel approach to explaining word order variation in the early Germanic languages. Initial observations about verb placement as a device marking types of rhetorical relations made on data from Old High German (cf. Hinterhölzl & Petrova 2005) are now reconsidered on a larger scale and compared with evidence from other early Germanic languages. The paper claims that the identification of information-structural domains in a sentence is best achieved by taking into account the interaction between the pragmatic features of discourse referents and properties of discourse organization.
We adopt Markert and Nissim (2005)’s approach of using the World Wide Web to resolve cases of coreferent bridging for German and discuss the strength and weaknesses of this approach. As the general approach of using surface patterns to get information on ontological relations between lexical items has only been tried on English, it is also interesting to see whether the approach works for German as well as it does for English and what differences between these languages need to be accounted for. We also present a novel approach for combining several patterns that yields an ensemble that outperforms the best-performing single patterns in terms of both precision and recall.
When a statistical parser is trained on one treebank, one usually tests it on another portion of the same treebank, partly due to the fact that a comparable annotation format is needed for testing. But the user of a parser may not be interested in parsing sentences from the same newspaper all over, or even wants syntactic annotations for a slightly different text type. Gildea (2001) for instance found that a parser trained on the WSJ portion of the Penn Treebank performs less well on the Brown corpus (the subset that is available in the PTB bracketing format) than a parser that has been trained only on the Brown corpus, although the latter one has only half as many sentences as the former. Additionally, a parser trained on both the WSJ and Brown corpora performs less well on the Brown corpus than on the WSJ one. This leads us to the following questions that we would like to address in this paper: - Is there a difference in usefulness of techniques that are used to improve parser performance between the same-corpus and the different-corpus case? - Are different types of parsers (rule-based and statistical) equally sensitive to corpus variation? To achieve this, we compared the quality of the parses of a hand-crafted constraint-based parser and a statistical PCFG-based parser that was trained on a treebank of German newspaper text.
In the past, a divide could be seen between ’deep’ parsers on the one hand, which construct a semantic representation out of their input, but usually have significant coverage problems, and more robust parsers on the other hand, which are usually based on a (statistical) model derived from a treebank and have larger coverage, but leave the problem of semantic interpretation to the user. More recently, approaches have emerged that combine the robustness of datadriven (statistical) models with more detailed linguistic interpretation such that the output could be used for deeper semantic analysis. Cahill et al. (2002) use a PCFG-based parsing model in combination with a set of principles and heuristics to derive functional (f-)structures of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). They show that the derived functional structures have a better quality than those generated by a parser based on a state-of-the-art hand-crafted LFG grammar. Advocates of Dependency Grammar usually point out that dependencies already are a semantically meaningful representation (cf. Menzel, 2003). However, parsers based on dependency grammar normally create underspecified representations with respect to certain phenomena such as coordination, apposition and control structures. In these areas they are too "shallow" to be directly used for semantic interpretation. In this paper, we adopt a similar approach to Cahill et al. (2002) using a dependency-based analysis to derive functional structure, and demonstrate the feasibility of this approach using German data. A major focus of our discussion is on the treatment of coordination and other potentially underspecified structures of the dependency data input. F-structure is one of the two core levels of syntactic representation in LFG (Bresnan, 2001). Independently of surface order, it encodes abstract syntactic functions that constitute predicate argument structure and other dependency relations such as subject, predicate, adjunct, but also further semantic information such as the semantic type of an adjunct (e.g. directional). Normally f-structure is captured as a recursive attribute value matrix, which is isomorphic to a directed graph representation. Figure 5 depicts an example target f-structure. As mentioned earlier, these deeper-level dependency relations can be used to construct logical forms as in the approaches of van Genabith and Crouch (1996), who construct underspecified discourse representations (UDRSs), and Spreyer and Frank (2005), who have robust minimal recursion semantics (RMRS) as their target representation. We therefore think that f-structures are a suitable target representation for automatic syntactic analysis in a larger pipeline of mapping text to interpretation. In this paper, we report on the conversion from dependency structures to fstructure. Firstly, we evaluate the f-structure conversion in isolation, starting from hand-corrected dependencies based on the TüBa-D/Z treebank and Versley (2005)´s conversion. Secondly, we start from tokenized text to evaluate the combined process of automatic parsing (using Foth and Menzel (2006)´s parser) and f-structure conversion. As a test set, we randomly selected 100 sentences from TüBa-D/Z which we annotated using a scheme very close to that of the TiGer Dependency Bank (Forst et al., 2004). In the next section, we sketch dependency analysis, the underlying theory of our input representations, and introduce four different representations of coordination. We also describe Weighted Constraint Dependency Grammar (WCDG), the dependency parsing formalism that we use in our experiments. Section 3 characterises the conversion of dependencies to f-structures. Our evaluation is presented in section 4, and finally, section 5 summarises our results and gives an overview of problems remaining to be solved.
This paper is concerned with the tagging of spatial expressions in German newspaper articles, assigning a meaning to the expression and classifying the usages of the spatial expression and linking the derived referent to an event description. In our system, we implemented the activation of concepts in a very simple fashion, a concept is activated once (with a cost depending on the item that activated it) and is left activated thereafter. As an example, a city also activates the nodes for the region and the country it is part of, so that cities from one country are chosen over cities from different countries. A test corpus of 12 German newspaper articles was tested regarding several disambiguation strategies. Disambiguation was carried out via a beam search to find an approximately cost-optimal solution for the conflict set of potential grounding candidates for the tagged spatial expression. Test showed that the disambiguation strategies improved accuracy significantly.