Information Structure Categories Research Articles

Alternation preferences affect focus marking in German and English differently.

This study investigates the interplay between alternation preferences and corrective focus marking in the production of German and English speakers. Both languages prefer an alternation of strong and weak, and both use pitch accenting to indicate focus structure. The objective of the study is to determine whether the preference for rhythmic alternation can account for variations in the prosodic marking of focus. Contrary to previous claims, the results obtained from three production experiments indicate that rhythmic adjustment strategies do occur during focus marking. However, despite the similarities between the two languages, they employ different strategies when alternation and focus marking work in opposite directions. German speakers often employ a melodic alternation of high and low by realizing the first of two adjacent focus accents with a rising pitch accent (L*H), while English speakers frequently omit the first focus accent in clash contexts. This finding is further supported by a second experiment that investigates pitch accent clashes in rhythm rule contexts under various focus environments. The findings suggest that the preference for alternation can influence the prosodic marking of focus and contributes to variation in the realization of information-structure categories.

From sentential syntax to syntax of interaction

The framework of syntactic analysis developed by Izre'el (2018, 2020) situates the simplest structure found in spoken data - the unipartite clause - at the core of its model. The implementation of this framework for the analysis of existential constructions in Modern Hebrew (Izre'el 2022) demonstrates how the unipartite analysis on presumably sentential structures allows us to remodel and bypass former research question, providing a new perspective and novel answers. This contribution attempts to follow up on this analysis and develop it further in an interactional, dynamic perspective. I propose that the discussed framework would additionally benefit from dispensing with other traditional models, which similarly originate in the bipartite view of sentence structure. Shifting away from categories of Information Structure and from the partitioning of information into topic vs. comment/focus and predicate can advance our understanding of language and discourse, while avoiding the pitfalls of problematic and poorly definable concepts. In this view, interlocutors do not structure their contributions or interpret others’ speech by identifying topics, comments, foci, or predicates. Instead, they navigate through the interactive discourse relying on low-level local communicative instructions which signal attention requirements, relevance, local discourse moves, interactionally structured discourse relations, epistemic management, emotive stance and more. Situating the analysis in the dynamic perspective of online syntax opens the way to a more refined understanding of the data, and further research questions.

An information structure view on Romance yes-no question contours

The paper presents an information structure (IS) analysis of YNQ contours of nine Romance languages from a psycholinguistic perspective. The contours are presented in Frota & Prieto (2015). The psychological IS model defines four IS categories for describing IS partitions of information units and rules for the nuclear stress identification. Information units are contrast units (CUs) generated by the speech production mechanism at the cortex level in order to pair words/word groups within speech data flow. The contrast is an IS functional one at the information packaging level and is conveyed at the prosodic level by contrasted tonal features of IS functional elements. CU_predicate-CU_argument and CU_theme-CU_rheme are the two structural dimensions of IS partitions. The model formulates two IS-based nuclear stress rules that we have used in Romance YNQ contour analysis in order to identify nucleus (focus) of IS partitions that is an important factor to discriminate between different contour types: information seeking YNQ, confirmation seeking YNQ, or echo YNQ within the nine Romance languages.

The emergence of Information Structure in child speech: the acquisition ofc’est-clefts in French

AbstractConstructions marking information structure in French have been widely documented within the constructionist framework.C’est‘it is’ clefts have been demonstrated to express the focus of the sentence. Nevertheless, it remains unclear how children are able to acquire clefts, and how they develop information structure categories. The aim of this study is to investigate the acquisition of clefts in French through the usage-based framework, to understand (i) whether IS categories emerge gradually like other linguistic categories, and (ii) how children build IS categories. For this, I analysed 256c’est-clefts produced by three children between age 2 and 3. I show that most early clefts are produced by children with the chunkc’est moiassociated with the concrete function of requesting to perform an action themselves. This chunk then becomes a frame with slot, extending the function to other human referents and discourse participants with the function of requesting adults to perform an action. Another large portion of early clefts seems to belong to a frame with slotc’est Xwhose function is to identify the agent who carried out an action. These findings suggest that the information structure category of focus emerges gradually.

On word order variation and informationstructure in peninsular spanish and italian ‘why’-interrogatives

In this paper, we investigate the effect of information structure on word order in Italian and Peninsular Spanish ‘why’-interrogatives, and whether these two languages differ from each other. To this end, we conducted two empirical studies. In a parallel text corpus study, we compared the frequency of the word order patterns ‘why’SV and ‘why’VS, as well as the distribution of focal and non-focal subjects in the two languages. In order to get a deeper understanding of the impact of the information structural categories focus and givenness on word order in ‘why’-interrogatives, we conducted a forced-choice experiment. The results indicate that word order is affected by focus in Italian, while it is not determined by any information structural category in Peninsular Spanish. We show that Italian and Peninsular Spanish ‘why’-interrogatives differ from each other in two ways. First, non-focal subjects occur preverbally in Italian, while they occupy the postverbal position in Peninsular Spanish. Second, Italian reveals a lower level of optionality with respect to word order patterns. Even though we find a high preference for the postverbal position in Peninsular Spanish, we argue that this limitation is related to a higher flexibility regarding word order in Peninsular Spanish than in Italian which does not allows for ‘why’VSO in contrast to Peninsular Spanish.

Topic unit detection in spontaneous speech

This paper deals with an inter-annotator agreement test involving the identification of the information unit of Topic as defined within the framework of the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT). Fleiss’s kappa statistic was used to measure the agreement among the four annotators who took part in the test. The data used was sampled from C-ORAL-BRASIL II, a spontaneous speech corpus of Brazilian Portuguese. The paper begins by outlining of the theoretical underpinnings of L-AcT, dedicating special attention to aspects directly related to the notion of Topic. Section 2 presents the pilot test and discusses methodological and theoretical issues that were relevant for the design of the protocol that was eventually used in the actual test. Sections 3 and 4 deal with the test, its protocol and results (the kappa coefficient for the general agreement was 0.79, which by usual standards represents a substantial agreement). Section 5 first provides a brief review of a few studies conducted according to other frameworks which have dealt with inter-rater agreement on the annotation of information structure categories. Finally, the errors observed in the test are analyzed qualitatively.

The incremental processing of focus, givenness and prosodic prominence

This study on German investigates the real-time comprehension of items in First Occurrence Focus (focused and new), Second Occurrence Focus (focused and given), Quasi Second Occurrence Focus (derogatory expressions that are referentially given and lexically new) and Background (non-focused and given), which are marked by different levels of prosodic prominence. While previous electrophysiological research tested mismatches between prosody and information structure, the present study assessed contextually licensed, appropriate prosodic realizations of stimuli. Our EEG experiment revealed distinct topographic profiles for information structure and prosody. As to prosody, we found a biphasic pattern over anterior brain regions for (secondarily prominent) phrase accents (marking Second Occurrence Focus) and deaccentuation (marking Background) but not for pitch accents (marking First Occurrence Focus), indicating an inverse relation between processing effort and the level of perceived prominence. The event-related potentials for Quasi Second Occurrence Focus items resembled First Occurrence Focus items although the former were deaccented. As to information structural contrasts, First Occurrence Focus engendered a pronounced negativity over posterior sites relative to Second Occurrence Focus and Background. Quasi Second Occurrence Focus showed an intermediate negativity. These differences can probably be accounted for by (lexically) new rather than focused information. In general, the data indicate that both prosodic cues and information structural categories influence the incremental processing of spoken language and that pitch accents and newness fulfill independent prominence-lending functions.

Perspectives on information structure in Austronesian languages ed. by Sonja Riesberg, Asako Shiohara, and Atsuko Utsumi

Reviewed by: Perspectives on information structure in Austronesian languages ed. by Sonja Riesberg, Asako Shiohara, and Atsuko Utsumi Dejan Matić Perspectives on information structure in Austronesian languages. Ed. by Sonja Riesberg, Asako Shiohara, and Atsuko Utsumi. (Studies in diversity linguistics 21). Berlin: Language Science, 2018. Pp. iv, 428. ISBN 9783961101092. $56 (Hb). There has been in the past decade a surge of interest in the investigation of the relationship between discourse and grammar in lesser-known languages, but the number of publications devoted to this topic is still negligible in comparison to those dealing with well-researched national languages. Perspectives on information structure in Austronesian languages, edited by Sonja Riesberg, Asako Shiohara, and Atsuko Utsumi, is a welcome addition to the slowly growing body of literature on the subject.1 The focus is on Western Malayo-Polynesian, with a number of chapters devoted to two ‘big’ languages, Tagalog and different varieties of Malay, but other Austronesian groups are represented as well, including Formosan, Central Malayo-Polynesian, and Oceanic. [End Page 726] The volume is divided into three parts, which focus on three aspects of what is traditionally subsumed under information structure: the form of NPs and reference tracking, the impact of information structure on syntax, and the relationship of information structure and prosody. The first part consists of four chapters that deal with the influence of such factors as givenness, familiarity, referential persistence, animacy, stance, engagement, and so forth on the selection of the forms of NPs. Rik De Busser’s contribution investigates the mechanisms of establishing referential cohesion in oral narratives and Bible translations in Bunun (Formosan), testing formal (word class), semantic (NP meaning), and discourse-pragmatic parameters (position in the text, relationship with coreferential expressions, etc.). ‘Stance, categorisation, and information structure in Malay’, by František Kratochvíl, Nur Izdihar Binte Ismail, and Diyana Hamzah, is devoted to referent tracking in Singapore Malay, based on the investigation of controlled discourse. There appears to be a split between animate and inanimate referents, such that the former but not the latter can be subject to the so-called strong epistemic stance, which seems to boil down to familiarity. This has repercussions for the ways referents are encoded and tracked in discourse. The only factor that seems to be stronger than stance is the persistence of a referent in subsequent discourse. The following chapter, written by Stefan Schnell, focuses on the meaning and use of demonstratives in Vera’a (Oceanic, Vanuatu). It is argued that the meaning of Vera’a demonstratives cannot be defined along spatial coordinates, such that other, endo- and exophoric, functions are derived from this purported core meaning. Instead, Schnell shows that demonstratives are interactional, in the sense that they are used to manage the attention states of the interlocutors. Their primary meanings are procedural and can be circumscribed as ‘you do not attend to this’ (speaker-oriented demonstratives), ‘you and I attend to this’ (addressee-oriented), and ‘I do not attend to this’ (distal). Major discourse effects derived from these procedural meanings are switch of the focus of attention (speaker-oriented) and maintaining and reinforcing the existing focus of attention (addressee-oriented), while distals are used when joint attention is not relevant. The chapter by Asako Shiohara and Anthony Jukes tackles the use of articles, demonstratives, and possessive NPs to encode different types of referential statuses in the Manado variety of Malay, showing that articles/demonstratives are used for situational and anaphoric reference, while possessive NPs indicate association with the larger shared situation. Six chapters in the second part of the book deal with the notions of topic, focus, and contrast and their influence on clause syntax in Austronesian, focusing mostly on voice, word order, and left dislocation. In the opening chapter, I Wayan Arka and I Nyomang Sedeng provide a general overview of information-structural phenomena in the Sembiran dialect of Balinese, focusing on NP encoding, word order, and voice. The authors rely on a set of predefined information-structural categories based on different combinations of values for...

Mapping prosody onto meaning – the case of information structure in American English

ABSTRACTProsody is a central part of human speech, with prosodic modulations of the signal expressing important communicative functions. Yet, the exact mechanisms of how listeners map prosodic aspects of the speech signal onto speaker-intended discourse functions are only poorly understood. Here we present three perception experiments that test the mapping between the prosodic form of a heard utterance and possible information structural categories (here: focus and givenness) determined by a discourse context. Results suggest varying degrees of accuracy dependent on the specific information structure categories that are presented to the listener in the experiment (the target and the competitor). Moreover, listeners are sometimes biased towards or against certain discourse contexts. These biases are compatible with the idea that listeners infer speaker intentions based not only on bottom-up processing of acoustic cues but also on probabilistic knowledge about how likely prosodic forms co-occur with specific discourse contexts.

Tracing the sources of Information Structure: Towards the study of interactional management of information

Building upon previous literature and insights from natural corpus data, this paper questions the theoretical bases and applicability of Information-Structural categories, such as topic and focus, and proposes an alternative approach to this field. In the proposed framework, so-called “information-structural” phenomena are epiphenomenal effects of diverse linguistic devices, related directly to a broad array of primarily intersubjective, interactional and discourse-structuring aspects of communication and language. The paper presents cross-linguistic data that support this view and proposes the ensuing directions for the systematic study of these phenomena.

Prominence, Accent and Information Structure

The paper discusses the tenets of the complex interaction between syntax, prosody and information structure in German. A prominence-based approach to the interface is proposed in an account that crucially extends the object of syntax from the sentence level to the discourse level. The latter move allows to reconcile formal approaches and functional approaches to grammar and solves an old problem posed by the parallel impact of information structural categories on the phonological and semantic interpretation of the clause in generative grammar.

Fronted NPs in a verb-initial language – clause-internal or external? Prosodic cues to the rescue!

This paper investigates prosodic features of fronted constituents in the verb-initial Oceanic language Gela (spoken by about 16.000 people in Solomon Islands). Although Gela’s basic constituent order is verb-(object-)subject/predicate-subject, constituents can appear in front of the verbal predicate. Fronted constituents in Gela can be interpreted as pre-clausal (i.e. external to the following clause, immediately preceding it) or clause-initial (i.e. clause-internal, at the very beginning of the clause), each of which can be associated with certain information structure categories of topics and focus. This paper discusses how prosody provides clues towards the interpretation of fronted constituents as pre-clausal or clause-initial, based on a quantitative study of their prosodic correlates. We argue for using prosodic criteria established on clear examples to help analyse ambiguous cases. The results are compatible with an approach that recognises the importance of prosody in syntactic analysis and contribute data from a little known language to the discussion to what degree prosodic and syntactic phrasing are aligned.This article is part of the special collection: Prosody and Constituent Structure

Unsupervised Declarative Knowledge Induction for Constraint-Based Learning of Information Structure in Scientific Documents

Inferring the information structure of scientific documents is useful for many NLP applications. Existing approaches to this task require substantial human effort. We propose a framework for constraint learning that reduces human involvement considerably. Our model uses topic models to identify latent topics and their key linguistic features in input documents, induces constraints from this information and maps sentences to their dominant information structure categories through a constrained unsupervised model. When the induced constraints are combined with a fully unsupervised model, the resulting model challenges existing lightly supervised feature-based models as well as unsupervised models that use manually constructed declarative knowledge. Our results demonstrate that useful declarative knowledge can be learned from data with very limited human involvement.

Is Korean -(n)un a topic marker? On the nature of -(n)un and its relation to information structure

Basic categories of information structure (e.g. topic, focus, contrast) are known to be crosslinguistically expressed by various linguistic devices such as special intonation contours, syntactic mechanisms, and morphological markers. However, the nature of the relation between the categories and their linguistic “markers” has been rarely discussed. To be more specific, despite the rich literature on information structure, whether the categories are directly or indirectly related to their markers has not been of much interest to linguists until quite recently. The main purpose of this paper is to unveil the nature of the relation between Korean -(n)un and the information-structural notions related to it, namely, topic and contrast. Based on a corpus study, it will be claimed that -(n)un is not a topic/contrast marker per se but its function is to impose salience on a discourse referent. Topicality and contrast, widely assumed to be directly marked by -(n)un, will be claimed to be only derived from the interaction of the proposed meaning of -(n)un and various syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors. Consequently, this paper provides a strong support for recent attempts to show that the information-structural categories are merely pragmatic effects rather than stable and discrete universal primitives.

Unsupervised discovery of information structure in biomedical documents

Information structure (IS) analysis is a text mining technique, which classifies text in biomedical articles into categories that capture different types of information, such as objectives, methods, results and conclusions of research. It is a highly useful technique that can support a range of Biomedical Text Mining tasks and can help readers of biomedical literature find information of interest faster, accelerating the highly time-consuming process of literature review. Several approaches to IS analysis have been presented in the past, with promising results in real-world biomedical tasks. However, all existing approaches, even weakly supervised ones, require several hundreds of hand-annotated training sentences specific to the domain in question. Because biomedicine is subject to considerable domain variation, such annotations are expensive to obtain. This makes the application of IS analysis across biomedical domains difficult. In this article, we investigate an unsupervised approach to IS analysis and evaluate the performance of several unsupervised methods on a large corpus of biomedical abstracts collected from PubMed. Our best unsupervised algorithm (multilevel-weighted graph clustering algorithm) performs very well on the task, obtaining over 0.70 F scores for most IS categories when applied to well-known IS schemes. This level of performance is close to that of lightly supervised IS methods and has proven sufficient to aid a range of practical tasks. Thus, using an unsupervised approach, IS could be applied to support a wide range of tasks across sub-domains of biomedicine. We also demonstrate that unsupervised learning brings novel insights into IS of biomedical literature and discovers information categories that are not present in any of the existing IS schemes. The annotated corpus and software are available at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/∼dk427/bio14info.html.

Constraints on noun phrase discontinuity in an Australian language: The role of prosody and information structure

Discontinuous noun phrases have posed a long-standing challenge for syntactic analysis. While there exists increasing evidence that discontinuous NPs are associated with specific information structure constellations crosslinguistically, Australian languages continue to be presented in the literature as radically non-configurational, with unlimited freedom of word order. We argue for Jaminjung, an Australian language of the Mirndi family, that once true NP discontinuity is carefully distinguished from other, superficially similar constructions, it is in fact highly constrained and can be described in terms of very specific information structure categories. The first of these, contrastive argument focus on an NP containing a given element, is widely attested crosslinguistically. The second, sentence focus, has only rarely been associated with noun phrase discontinuity in the literature. We show that the two types can be distinguished on prosodic grounds. Our account of both types challenges some previous analyses which rely on different information structure values for the parts of the discontinuous NP. The findings underscore the importance of taking into account prosodic information and discourse context in the syntactic analysis of spoken language.

Fronting, dislocation, and the syntactic role of discourse-related features

This paper focuses on the syntactic role of the features related to discourse and information structure. It is argued that information-structure notions are encoded in syntax as syntactic features projecting their own phrase structure, and are fundamental in accounting for cross-linguistic variation. The word order alternations and syntactic operations which are strictly dependent on the discourse/informational properties of the sentence, as well as the different grammatical properties characterizing different information-structure categories, can all be related to the syntactic role of discourse-related features, the functional projections with which they are associated, and the type of movement that these features trigger. Under this view, this paper offers an analysis of fronting and dislocation phenomena in Romance, which entails that variation with respect to these processes is correlated to the activation and to the attraction properties of the functional projections encoding information-structure distinctions. Keywords: discourse-related features; information structure; functional projections; topic; informational focus; contrastive focus; Romance; Sicilian

Information Structure and the Expression of Givenness in Buglere (Chibchan)

This paper provides an account of the expression of information structure in general, as well as of the information-structure category of givenness in particular, in Buglere, a Chibchan language of Costa Rica and Panama. Previous accounts of the existing morphosyntactic strategies to encode information-structure categories in Buglere are examined on the basis of a typical Buglere narrative, Additionally, the information-structure category of givenness is briefly inspected by means of two production experiments; the idea is to ascertain whether the tendencies found in natural speech remain in controlled, artificial environments. The analysis of the spontaneous narrative tends to confirm previous accounts of the information-structure patterns in Buglere, while the results of the experiments only partially confirm previous accounts. The emerging discrepancies are explained as being caused by the environment of the experiments, which speakers might have found slightly unnatural.

On identifiability and definiteness in English and German

Despite increasingly numerous works dealing with issues of information structure from a cross-linguistic perspective, contrastive information structure analysis is not an established field of research yet. The paper aims at showing that it is worthwhile staking out and exploring such a field. Starting off from a brief reminder of what information structure is, as conceived of by Lambrecht (1994), the paper proposes guiding questions that contrastive information structure analysis should strive to answer. It then turns to the discussion of an example of contrastive analysis which involves the information structural category of identifiability. It is argued that the variable x in the English formula ‘as for x’ and the corresponding German formula was x {(an)betrifft / angeht} in sentence initial position can only be instantiated by expressions that have identifiable discourse referents. Results of a corpus-based comparison of expressions which instantiate x in these English and German formulas are presented. These results show contrasts between English and German in the lexicogrammatical expression of identifiable referents that go beyond the better-known differences in the use of the definite article. A methodological point to be made is that Lambrechtian categories of information structure (identifiability and activation of discourse referents, focus structure) may serve as tertia comparationis for the analysis of contrasts on the lexicogrammatical level.

Information structural notions and the fallacy of invariant correlates

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.