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Introduction
(2007)
Semantics
(2007)
Morphology
(2007)
Introduction
(2007)
The annotation guidelines introduced in this chapter present an attempt to create a unique infrastructure for the encoding of data from very different languages. The ultimate target of these annotations is to allow for data retrieval for the study of information structure, and since information structure interacts with all levels of grammar, the present guidelines cover all levels of grammar too. After introducing the guidelines, the current chapter also presents an evaluation by means of measurements of the inter-annotator agreement.
Information structure
(2007)
Traces
(2007)
Implicated presuppositions
(2008)
It is widely believed that existential quantifiers can bring about the semantic effects of a scope which is wider than their actual syntactic scope (See Fodor & Sag (1982), Cresti (1995), Kratzer (1995), Reinhart (1995) and Winter (1995), among many others.) On the other hand, it is assumed that the syntactic scope of universal quantifiers can be determined unequivocally by the semantics. This paper shows that this second assumption is wrong; universal quantifiers can also bring about scope illusions, though in a very specific environment. In particular, we argue that in the environment of generic tense, universal quantifiers can show the semantic effects of a scope which is wider than the one that is actually realized at LF. Our argument has four steps. First, we show that in generic contexts, universal quantifiers escape standard “scope-islands” (Section 1). Second, we show how the effects of wide scope in generic contexts can be achieved without syntactic wide scope (Section 2.1). Third, we show that this result is actually forced on us, once we take seriously certain independent issues concerning the interpretation of generic tense (Sections 2.2 - 2.4). Finally, the semantics of generic tense and, in particular, its interaction with focus, will yield some intricate new predictions, which, as we show, are borne out (Sections 3 - 5).
The paper presents an additional argument for a specific account of semantic binding: the flat-binding analysis. The argument is based on observations concerning sloppy interpretations in verb phrase ellipsis when the binder is not the subject of the elided VP. In one such case, it is important that one of the binders belong to the domain of the other. This case can be derived from the flat-binding analysis as is shown in the paper, while it is unclear how to account for it within other analyses of semantic binding.
Trubetzkoy's recognition of a delimitative function of phonology, serving to signal boundaries between morphological units, is expressed in terms of alignment constraints in Optimality Theory, where the relevant constraints require specific morphological boundaries to coincide with phonological structure (Trubetzkoy 1936, 1939, McCarthy & Prince 1993). The approach pursued in the present article is to investigate the distribution of phonological boundary signals to gain insight into the criteria underlying morphological analysis. The evidence from English and Swedish suggests that necessary and sufficient conditions for word-internal morphological analysis concern the recognizability of head constituents, which include the rightmost members of compounds and head affixes. The claim is that the stability of word-internal boundary effects in historical perspective cannot in general be sufficiently explained in terms of memorization and imitation of phonological word form. Rather, these effects indicate a morphological parsing mechanism based on the recognition of word-internal head constituents. Head affixes can be shown to contrast systematically with modifying affixes with respect to syntactic function, semantic content, and prosodic properties. That is, head affixes, which cannot be omitted, often lack inherent meaning and have relatively unmarked boundaries, which can be obscured entirely under specific phonological conditions. By contrast, modifying affixes, which can be omitted, consistently have inherent meaning and have stronger boundaries, which resist prosodic fusion in all phonological contexts. While these correlations are hardly specific to English and Swedish it remains to be investigated to which extent they hold cross-linguistically. The observation that some of the constituents identified on the basis of prosodic evidence lack inherent meaning raises the issue of compositionality. I will argue that certain systematic aspects of word meaning cannot be captured with reference to the syntagmatic level, but require reference to the paradigmatic level instead. The assumption is then that there are two dimensions of morphological analysis: syntagmatic analysis, which centers on the criteria for decomposing words in terms of labelled constituents, and paradigmatic analysis, which centers on the criteria for establishing relations among (whole) words in the mental lexicon. While meaning is intrinsically connected with paradigmatic analysis (e.g. base relations, oppositeness) it is not essential to syntagmatic analysis.
In morphological systems of the agglutinative type we sometimes encounter a nearly perfect one-to-one relation between form and function. Turkish inflectional morphology is, of course, the standard textbook example. Things seem to be quite different in systems of the flexive type. Declension in Contemporary Standard Russian (henceforth Russian, for short) may be cited as a typical example: We find, among other things, cumulative markers, “synonymous” endings (e.g., dative singular noun forms in -i, -e, or -u), and “homonymous” endings (e.g., -i, genitive, dative, and prepositional singular). True, some endings are more of an agglutinative nature, being bound to a specific case-number combination and applying across declensions, e.g., -am (dative plural, all nouns); and some cross the boundaries of word classes, e.g., -o, which serves as the nominative/accusative singular ending of neuter forms of pronouns (and adjectives) and as the nominative/accusative singular ending of (most) neuter nouns as well. Still, many observers have been struck by the impression that what we face here are rather uneconomic or even, so to speak, unnatural structures. But perhaps flexive systems are not as complicated as they seem. What seems to be uneconomic complexity may be, at least partially, an artifact of uneconomic descriptions.
Objektrelativsätze mit haben
(2006)
Objektrelativsätze mit dem Vollverb haben sind im gesprochenen Deutsch vergleichsweise häufig. Sie treten als einfache Objekt-Subjekt-Verb-Strukturen auf, z.B. die ich habe, und auch erweitert durch Modalisierungen und/oder Adverbialphrasen etc., z.B. wie in die ick uff de GRUNDschule schon hatte. Um die Differenzen, die sich zwischen den Verwendungen erkennen lassen, zu erfassen, kann eine standardgrammatische Beschreibung allenfalls als Ausgangsbasis dienen. Ein konstruktionsgrammatisches Vorgehen hingegen, bei dem alle linguistischen Ebenen der Sprachbeschreibung berücksichtigt werden, zeigt die Bandbreite von haben-Relativkonstruktionen auf. In Zusammenhang mit den Matrixstrukturen und unter Berücksichtigung der Diskurspragmatik (informationsstrukturelle und konversationelle Dimensionen) lassen sich vier verschiedene Konstruktionen mit haben-Relativsätzen konturieren: eine Präsentativkonstruktion, eine Topikkonstruktion, eine cleftartige Konstruktion und eine Konstruktion mit identifizierenden haben-Relativsätzen.
Mit Erstaunen stellen LinguistInnen aus Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz immer wieder fest, dass sich in der "kleinen" Schweiz der geschlechtergerechte Sprachgebrauch in Öffentlichkeit und Alltag weit stärker durchgesetzt hat als in den anderen deutschsprachigen Ländern. Diese Einschätzung gilt es hier zu überprüfen und, falls sie zutrifft, zu belegen. Ausserdem werden - als erster Schritt fur weitere Untersuchungen - Thesen formuliert, die Erklärungen liefern, worauf diese Entwicklung zurückgeführt werden kann. Mit diesem Artikel geben wir anband von ausgewählten, konkreten Beispielen einen Einblick in die Situation, wie sie sich zur Zeit in der Schweiz präsentiert. Wir konzentrieren uns - unter sprachsoziologischer Perspektive - auf eine erste Bestandesaufnahme mit dem Blick auf die Diskussion in den Medien, die Institutionalisierung und die Einstellungen, die die spezifische sprachliche Situation in der Deutschschweiz prägen. Einen Rahmen fur unsere Untersuchung bilden die Überlegungen von Schräpel (SCHRÄPEL 1986), die die Auseinandersetzung um nichtsexistische Sprache als ein besonderes Sprachwandelphänomen untersucht. Sprachwandel im Vollzug ist einerseits einfacher zu erfassen als einer, der weiter zurückliegt, andererseits erschwert die Fülle des greifbaren Materials auch den Durchblick und das klare Erkennen von Tendenzen. Aus diesem Grund werten wir unser Datenmaterial nicht quantitativ aus, sondern konzentrieren uns darauf, für verschiedene Aspekte typische Beispiele zu geben und so den Stand der öffentlichen Diskussion und die Breite der vertretenen Meinungen darzustellen. Es wäre verlockend, das hier vorliegende Material auch allgemeinerer Form unter der Thematik "Sprachkritik" oder "Einstellungen" zu analysieren. Dies ist jedoch nicht im Zentrum unserer Fragestellung, weshalb wir bei einigen Beispielen auf entsprechende Untersuchungen (z.B. BLAUBERGS 1980, SCHOENTHAL 1989) verweisen.
When in 1934, Robert BLEICHSTEINER published the Caucasian language specimina contained in the "travel book" of the 17th century Turkish writer Evliya Çelebi , he was struck by the amount of reliability he found in Evliya’s notations: "(Die Sprachproben) sind, von einzelnen Mißverständnissen abgesehen, und wenn man die falschen Punktierungen und Irrtümer der Kopisten abrechnet, außerordentlich gut, ja zuweilen mit einem gewissen phonetischen Geschick wiedergegeben, was der Auffassungsgabe und dem Eifer Evliyas ein hohes Zeugnis ausstellt. Man muß bedenken, wie schwer das arabische Alphabet, ohne weitere Unterscheidungszeichen, wie sie die islamischen Kaukasusvölker anwenden, die verwickelten, oft über 70 verschiedene Phoneme umfassenden Lautsysteme wiederzugeben imstande ist. Wenn trotzdem die Entzifferung der Sprachproben zum größten Teil geglückt ist, so muß man der ungewöhnlichen Begabung des türkischen Reisenden und Gelehrten schrankenlose Bewunderung zollen" (85). ...
Daemonica Irano-Caucasica
(1994)
Eine bedeutende, wenn auch bisher vielfach verkannte Nebenüberlieferung iranischen Sprachguts findet sich in den sog. südkaukasischen oder kartvelischen Sprachen, unter denen das Georgische mit seiner im 5. Jh. einsetzenden, umfangreichen literarischen Bezeugung eine vorrangige Stellung einnimmt. Zu den zahlreichen Iranismen, die im Georgischen fest verankert sind, wird seit geraumer Zeit auch das Wort dev- gerechnet. Bereits Davit Cˇ UBINAŠVILI kennzeichnete das Wort in seinem Georgisch-Russischen Wörterbuch von 1887 als "persisch" ("s˙pars[uli]"); er setzte das Substantiv ("s.") mit dem Wort gveleša˙pi "Drachen, Ungeheuer" gleich und führte weiter aus. ...
Nachdem die Domäne des Computers im universitären Einsatz noch bis vor wenigen Jahren im naturwissenschaftlichen Bereich lag, werden elektronische Verfahren heute mehr und mehr auch in den Geisteswissenschaften angewendet. Das primäre Einsatzgebiet liegt dabei zweifellos in der Textverarbeitung; der Computer erweist sich hier als ein universal einsetzbares Hilfsmittel, das die Gestaltung eines Textes von seiner Konzipierung bis zur Drucklegung in der Hand des Autors ermöglicht und herkömmlichen Verfahren somit überlegen ist. ...
Ihre frühesten Sprachzeugnisse hat uns die keltische Bevölkerung der britischen Inseln bekanntlich in einer Anzahl von Steininschriften hinterlassen, die in der sog. Ogamschrift gehalten sind. Der größte Teil dieser Inschriften, von denen rund 300 hauptsächlich aus Südirland und Wales bekannt sind, wird nach allgemeiner Ansicht in die Zeit zwischen dem 4. oder 5. Jh. und dem 8. Jh. n. Chr. datiert. Bis heute ist weder die Entstehung des eigentümlichen Ogamalphabets, das mit keinem anderen Schriftsystem des gegebenen Zeitraums vergleichbar ist, noch die Bedeutung aller Zeichen eindeutig geklärt. ...
When we pay close attention to the prosody of Wh-questions in Japanese, we discover many novel and interesting empirical puzzles that would require us to devise a much finer syntactic component of grammar. This paper addresses the issues that pose some problems to such an elaborated grammar, and offers solutions, making an appeal to the information structure and sentence processing involved in the interpretation of interrogative and focus constructions.
Fronting of an infinite VP across a finite main verb - akin to German "VP-topicalization" - can be found also in Czech and Polish. The paper discusses evidence from large corpora for this process and some of its properties, both syntactic and information-structural. Based on this case, criteria for more user-friedly searching and retrieval of corpus data in syntactic research are being developed.
This paper describes the creation and preparation of TUSNELDA, a collection of corpus data built for linguistic research. This collection contains a number of linguistically annotated corpora which differ in various aspects such as language, text sorts / data types, encoded annotation levels, and linguistic theories underlying the annotation. The paper focuses on this variation on the one hand and the way how these heterogeneous data are integrated into one resource on the other hand.
The paper explicates the notions of topic, contrastive topic, and focus as used in the analysis of Hungarian. Based on distributional criteria, topic and focus are claimed to represent distinct structural positions in the left periphery of the Hungarian sentence, associated with logical rather than discourse functions. The topic is interpreted as the logical subject of predication. The focus is analyzed as a derived main predicate, specifying the referential content of the set denoted by the backgrounded post-focus section of the sentence. The exhaustivity associated with the focus and the existential presupposition associated with the background are shown to be properties following from their specificational predication relation.
The recognition of the prosodic focus position in German-learning infants from 4 to 14 months
(2007)
The aim of the present study was to elucidate in a study with 4-, 6-, 8-, and 14-month-old German-learning children, when and how they may acquire the regularities which underlie Focus-to-Stress Alignment (FSA) in the target language, that is, how prosody is associated with specific communicative functions. Our findings suggest, that 14-month-olds have already found out that German allows for variable focus positions, after having gone through a development which goes from a predominantly prosodically driven processing of the input to a processing where prosody interacts more and more with the growing lexical and syntactic knowledge of the child.
The paper investigates focus marking devices in the scarcely documented North-Ghanaian Gur language Konkomba. The two particles lé and lá occur under specific focus conditions and are therefore regarded as focus markers in the sparse literature. Comparing the distribution and obligatoriness of both alleged focus markers however, I show that one of the particles, lé, is better analyzed as a connective particle, i.e. as a syntactic rather than as a genuine pragmatic marker, and that comparable syntactic focus marking strategies for sentence-initial constituents are also known from related languages.
This paper deals with the conditions under which singular definites, on the one hand, and universally quantified DPs, on the other hand, receive interpretations according to which the sets denoted by the NP-complements of the respective determiner vary with the situations quantified over by a Q-adverb. I show that in both cases such interpretations depend on the availability of situation predicates that are compatible with the presuppositions associated with the respective determiner, as co-variation in both cases comes about via the binding of a covert situation variable that is contained within the NP-complement of the respective determiner. Secondly, I offer an account for the observation that the availability of a co-varying interpretation is more constrained in the case of universally quantified DPs than in the case of singular definites, as far as word order is concerned. This is shown to follow from the fact that co-varying definites in contrast to universally quantified DPs are inherently focus-marked.
Face-to-face communication is multimodal. In unscripted spoken discourse we can observe the interaction of several “semiotic layers”, modalities of information such as syntax, discourse structure, gesture, and intonation. We explore the role of gesture and intonation in structuring and aligning information in spoken discourse through a study of the co-occurrence of pitch accents and gestural apices. Metaphorical spatialization through gesture also plays a role in conveying the contextual relationships between the speaker, the government and other external forces in a naturally-occurring political speech setting.
Elke Kasimir´s paper (in this volume) argues against employing the notion of Givenness in the explanation of accent assignment. I will claim that the arguments against Givenness put forward by Kasimir are inconclusive because they beg the question of the role of Givenness. It is concluded that, more generally, arguments against Givenness as a diagnostic for information structural partitions should not be accepted offhand, since the notion of Givenness of discourse referents is (a) theoretically simple, (b) readily observable and quantifiable, and (c) bears cognitive significance.
A series of production and perception experiments investigating the prosody and well-formedness of special sentences, called Wide Focus Partial Fronting (WFPF), which consist of only one prosodic phrase and a unique initial accented argument, are reported on here. The results help us to decide between different models of German prosody. The absence of pitch height difference on the accent of the sentence speaks in favor of a relative model of prosody, in which accents are scaled relative to each other, and against models in which pitch accents are scaled in an absolute way. The results also speak for a model in which syntax, but not information structure, influences the prosodic phrasing. Finally, perception experiments show that the prosodic structure of sentences with a marked word order needs to be presented for grammaticality judgments. Presentation of written material only is not enough, and falsifies the results.
The semantics of ellipsis
(2005)
There are four phenomena that are particularly troublesome for theories of ellipsis: the existence of sloppy readings when the relevant pronouns cannot possibly be bound; an ellipsis being resolved in such a way that an ellipsis site in the antecedent is not understood in the way it was there; an ellipsis site drawing material from two or more separate antecedents; and ellipsis with no linguistic antecedent. These cases are accounted for by means of a new theory that involves copying syntactically incomplete antecedent material and an analysis of silent VPs and NPs that makes them into higher order definite descriptions that can be bound into.
This paper discusses the use of XSLT stylesheets as a filtering mechanism for refining the results of user queries on treebanks. The discussion is within the context of the TIGER treebank, the associated search engine and query language, but the general ideas can apply to any search engine for XML-encoded treebanks. It will be shown that important classes of linguistic phenomena can be accessed by applying relatively simple XSLT templates to the output of a query, effectively simulating the universal quantifier for a subset of the query language.
In order to investigate the empirical properties of focus, it is necessary to diagnose focus (or: “what is focused”) in particular linguistic examples. It is often taken for granted that the application of one single diagnostic tool, the so-called question-answer test, which roughly says that whatever a question asks for is focused in the answer, is a fool-proof test for focus. This paper investigates one example class where such uncritical belief in the question-answer test has led to the assumption of rather complex focus projection rules: in these examples, pitch accent placement has been claimed to depend on certain parts of the focused constituents being given or not. It is demonstrated that such focus projection rules are unnecessarily complex and in turn require the assumption of unnecessarily complicated meaning rules, not to speak of the difficulties to give a precise semantic/pragmatic definition of the allegedly involved givenness property. For the sake of the argument, an alternative analysis is put forward which relies solely on alternative sets following Mats Rooth´s work, and avoids any recourse to givenness. As it turns out, this alternative analysis is not only simpler but also makes in a critical case the better predictions.
In this paper we compare the behaviour of adverbs of frequency (de Swart 1993) like usually with the behaviour of adverbs of quantity like for the most part in sentences that contain plural definites. We show that sentences containing the former type of Q-adverb evidence that Quantificational Variability Effects (Berman 1991) come about as an indirect effect of quantification over situations: in order for quantificational variability readings to arise, these sentences have to obey two newly observed constraints that clearly set them apart from sentences containing corresponding quantificational DPs, and that can plausibly be explained under the assumption that quantification over (the atomic parts of) complex situations is involved. Concerning sentences with the latter type of Q-adverb, on the other hand, such evidence is lacking: with respect to the constraints just mentioned, they behave like sentences that contain corresponding quantificational DPs. We take this as evidence that Q-adverbs like for the most part do not quantify over the atomic parts of sum eventualities in the cases under discussion (as claimed by Nakanishi and Romero (2004)), but rather over the atomic parts of the respective sum individuals.
Japanese wh-questions always exhibit focus intonation (FI). Furthermore, the domain of FI exhibits a correspondence to the wh-scope. I propose that this phonology-semantics correspondence is a result of the cyclic computation of FI, which is explained under the notion of Multiple Spell-Out in the recent Minimalist framework. The proposed analysis makes two predictions: (1) embedding of an FI into another is possible; (2) (overt) movement of a wh-phrase to a phase edge position causes a mismatch between FI and wh-scope. Both predictions are tested experimentally, and shown to be borne out.
Prosodic focus in Vietnamese
(2007)
This paper reports on pilot work on the expression of Information Structure in Vietnamese and argues that Focus in Vietnamese is exclusively expressed prosodically: there are no specific focus markers, and the language uses phonology to express intonational emphasis in similar ways to languages like English or German. The exploratory data indicates that (i) focus is prosodically expressed while word order remains constant, (ii) listeners show good recoverability of the intended focus structure, and (iii) that there is a trading relationship between several phonetic parameters (duration, f0, amplitude) involved to signal prosodic (acoustic) emphasis.
Phonology and intonation
(2007)
The encoding standards for phonology and intonation are designed to facilitate consistent annotation of the phonological and intonational aspects of information structure, in languages across a range ofprosodic types. The guidelines are designed with the aim that a nonspecialist in phonology can both implement and interpret the resulting annotation.
This paper investigates the structural properties of morphosyntactically marked focus constructions, focussing on the often neglected non-focal sentence part in African tone languages. Based on new empirical evidence from five Gur and Kwa languages, we claim that these focus expressions have to be analysed as biclausal constructions even though they do not represent clefts containing restrictive relative clauses. First, we relativize the partly overgeneralized assumptions about structural correspondences between the out-of-focus part and relative clauses, and second, we show that our data do in fact support the hypothesis of a clause coordinating pattern as present in clause sequences in narration. It is argued that we deal with a non-accidental, systematic feature and that grammaticalization may conceal such basic narrative structures.
This article presents an analysis of German nicht...sondern... (contrastive not...but...) which departs from the commonly held view that this construction should be explained by appeal to its alleged corrective function. It will be demonstrated that in nicht A sondern B (not A but B), A and B just behave like stand-alone unmarked answers to a common question Q, and that this property of sondern is presuppositional in character. It is shown that from this general observation many interesting properties of nicht...sondern... follow, among them distributional differences between German "sondern" and German "aber" (contrastive but, concessive but), intonational requirements and exhaustivity effect sondern presupposition is furthermore argued to be the result of the conventionalization of conversational implicatures.
Three dimensions can be distinguished in a cross-linguistic account of information structure. First, there is the definition of the focus constituent, the part of the linguistic expression which is subject to some focus meaning. Second and third, there are the focus meanings and the array of structural devices that encode them. In a given language, the expression of focus is facilitated as well as constrained by the grammar within which the focus devices operate. The prevalence of focus ambiguity, the structural inability to make focus distinctions, will thus vary across languages, and within a language, across focus meanings.
In this paper, we present the Multiple Annotation approach, which solves two problems: the problem of annotating overlapping structures, and the problem that occurs when documents should be annotated according to different, possibly heterogeneous tag sets. This approach has many advantages: it is based on XML, the modeling of alternative annotations is possible, each level can be viewed separately, and new levels can be added at any time. The files can be regarded as an interrelated unit, with the text serving as the implicit link. Two representations of the information contained in the multiple files (one in Prolog and one in XML) are described. These representations serve as a base for several applications.
The paper presents an in-depth study of focus marking in Gùrùntùm, a West Ch adic language spoken in Bauchi Province of Northern Nigeria. Focus in Gùrùntùm is marked morphologically by means of a focus marker a, which typically precedes the focus constituent. Even though the morphological focus-marking system of Gùrùntùm allows for a lot of fine-grained distinctions in information structure (IS) in principle, the language is not entirely free of focus ambiguities that arise as the result of conflicting IS- and syntactic requirements that govern the placement of focus markers. We show that morphological focus marking with a applies across different types of focus, such as newinformation, contrastive, selective and corrective focus, and that a does not have a second function as a perfectivity marker, as is assumed in the literature. In contrast, we show at the end of the paper that a can also function as a foregrounding device at the level of discourse structure.
This paper presents the results of a production experiment on the intonation of sentences containing a negative polarity item (NPI) in Tokyo Japanese. The results show that NPI sentences exhibit a focus intonation: the F0-peak of the word to which an NPI is attached is raised, while the pitch contour after the NPI-attached word is compressed until the negation. This intonation pattern is parallel to that of wh-question, in which the F0 of the wh-phrase is raised while the post-wh-contour is compressed until the question particle.
This paper surveys a range of constructions in which prosody affects discourse function and discourse structure.We discuss English tag questions, negative polar questions, and what we call “focus” questions. We postulate that these question types are complex speech acts and outline an analysis in Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) to account for the interactions between prosody and discourse.
The aim of this paper is to validate a dataset collected by means of production experiments which are part of the Questionnaire on Information Structure. The experiments generate a range of information structure contexts that have been observed in the literature to induce specific constructions. This paper compares the speech production results from a subset of these experiments with specific claims about the reflexes of information structure in four different languages. The results allow us to evaluate and in most cases validate the efficacy of our elicitation paradigms, to identify potentially fruitful avenues of future research, and to highlight issues involved in interpreting speech production data of this kind.
While the Information Structure (IS) is most naturally interpreted as "structure of information", some may argue that it is structure of something else, and others may object to the use of the word "structure". This paper focuses on the question of whether the informational component can have structural properties such that it can be called "structure". The preliminary conclusion is that, althoughthere are some vague indications of structurehood in it, it is perhaps better understood to be a representation that encodes a finite set of information-based partitions, rather than structure.
In a first step, definitions of the irreducible information structural categories are given, and in a second step, it is shown that there are no invariant phonological or otherwise grammatical correlates of these categories. In other words, the phonology, syntax or morphology are unable to define information structure. It is a common mistake that information structural categories are expressed by invariant grammatical correlates, be they syntactic, morphological or phonological. It is rather the case that grammatical cues help speaker and hearer to sort out which element carries which information structural role, and only in this sense are the grammatical correlates of information structure important. Languages display variation as to the role of grammar in enhancing categories of information structure, and this variation reflects the variation found in the ‘normal’ syntax and phonology of languages.