How discourse context decides adversity explicitation from English to Chinese: a case study of Chinese adversative 但 “but”

We present a framework for the integrated analysis of the textual and prosodic characteristics of information structure in the Switchboard corpus of conversational English. Information structure describes the availability, organisation and salience of entities in a discourse model. We present standards for the annotation of information status (old, mediated and new), and give guidelines for annotating information structure, i.e. theme/rheme and back-ground/kontrast. We show that information structure in English can only be analysed concurrently with prosodic prominence and phrasing. This annotation, using stand-off XML in NXT, can help establish standards for the annotation of information structure in discourse.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the relations between thematic segments which constitue the intermediate level of information structure in discourse. The information structures are defined as hierarchically organized thematic-rhematic structures and, in their thematic part, the author distinguishes three levels represented by: global theme, theme of thematic segments and theme of sentence. The author focuses her attention on possible thematic-rhematic configurations appearing in the place where thematic segments contact.

The marking of information structure in German Sign Language

A framework for pragmatic analysis is proposed which treats discourse as a game, with context as a scoreboard organized around the questions under discussion by the interlocutors. The framework is intended to be coordinated with a dynamic compositional semantics. Accordingly, the context of utterance is modeled as a tuple of different types of information, and the questions therein — modeled, as is usual in formal semantics, as alternative sets of propositions — constrain the felicitous flow of discourse. A requirement of Relevance is satisfied by an utterance (whether an assertion, a question or a suggestion) iff it addresses the question under discussion. Finally, it is argued that the prosodic focus of an utterance canonically serves to reflect the question under discussion (at least in English), placing additional constraints on felicity in context. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.5.6 BibTeX info

This introductory paper discusses how recent developments in discourse-functional and interactionally oriented work have drastically changed the way we look at information structure, and more generally how we understand the grammatical resources used to organize discourse. It is shown how the axis described in the title of this volume, grammar-discourse-interaction, identifies both a theoretical development regarding the way in which linguistic facts are conceptualized, and an empirical development regarding the types of data on which the former are based. The discussion focuses on the latest and maybe most non-traditional development in the area of grammar and discourse organization, namely interactional linguistics. It is demonstrated how interactional linguistics, by inviting us to reconsider grammar in the light of the social and sequential organization of talk-in-interaction, radically changes the way we understand and analyze reference and more generally information structure in discourse. The paper closes with a brief presentation of the contributions to this volume, each stressing in its own way the idea that grammatical facts cannot be dissociated from social and sequential organization of talk-in-interaction.

Grammar: Functional Approaches

The relationship between focus and new information has been unclear despite being the subject of several information structure studies. Here, we report an eye-tracking experiment that explored the relationship between them in on-line discourse processing in Chinese reading. Focus was marked by the Chinese focus-particle “shi", which is equivalent to the cleft structure “it was… who…" in English. New information was defined as the target word that was not present in previous contexts. Our results show that, in the target region, focused information was processed more quickly than non-focused information, while new information was processed more slowly than given information. These results reveal differences in processing patterns between focus and newness, and suggest that they are different concepts that relate to different aspects of cognitive processing. In addition, the effect of new/given information occurred in the post-target region for the focus condition, but not for the non-focus condition, suggesting a complex relationship between focus and newness in the discourse integration stage.

Information design in optimal auctions

We study the information design problem in a single-unit auction setting. The information designer controls independent private signals according to which the buyers infer their binary private value. Assuming that the seller adopts Myerson (1981) optimal auction in response, we characterize both the buyer-optimal information structure which maximizes the buyers' surplus and the seller-worst information structure which minimizes the seller's revenue. We translate both information design problems into finite-dimensional constrained optimization problems for which the optimal information structures can be explicitly solved. In contrast to the case with one buyer (Roesler and Szentes, 2017 and Du, 2018), we show that with two or more buyers, the buyer-optimal information structure is different from the seller-worst information structure: the good is always sold under the seller-worst information structure but not under the buyer-optimal information structure. Nevertheless, as the number of buyers goes to infinity, both information structures converge to no disclosure. We also show that in an ex ante symmetric setting, an asymmetric information structure is never seller-worst but for some prior can generate a strictly higher surplus for the buyers than the symmetric buyer-optimal information structure.

From negation to shared knowledge: The evolution of utterance-final -canha in spoken Korean

Theme choices in Czech University students’ English-medium Master's theses

Utterance-final -ketun in spoken Korean: A particle for managing information structure in discourse

This is the afterword to the 2012 republication of "Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics". See also the annotated bibliography on related topics at <a href="http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~croberts/QUDbib/">http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~croberts/QUDbib/</a>. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.5.7 <a href="http://semantics-online.org/sp-bib/roberts-2012-afterword-article.bib">BibTeX info</a>

Research on Information Structure of Programmatic Advertising Markets

A linear‐quadratic optimal control is investigated in this article under the differential privacy (DP) philosophy to trade off the performance and privacy of sensitive information, where the two controllers have asymmetric information structure and some prescribed signal needs to be tracked. Note that the system output and tracking signal are always sensitive and easy to be filched by adversaries; thus the DP methodology is explored to protect them. Under DP Gaussian mechanism, the optimal linear controllers are first studied for finite‐horizon and infinite‐horizon problems. Then, the bounds of mean‐square error of steady‐state Kalman filter estimator is provided, and the DP parameter design will be guided that characterizes the privacy of sensitive information. As the DP Gaussian noise will degrade the controlled performance, the degraded performance is quantitatively calculated. Finally, a numerical example is given that shows the efficiency of obtained results.