Information Structure:
Empirical Perspectives on Theory

December, 02. & 03., 2011, Collaborative Research Centre "Information Structure", Germany

About the workshop

The Collaborative Research Centre 632 "Information Structure" at the University of Potsdam, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, and Freie Universität Berlin will host a graduate/postgraduate student conference on information structure on the 2nd and 3rd of December 2011.

The conference aims to bring together Ph.D. students or advanced MA students (or equivalent) working on the empirical investigation of information structure and information structural categories. Submissions may include but are not limited to studies from the fields of syntax, semantics, phonetics/phonology and their interfaces to information structure. We are interested in results obtained from a variety of different data types and methods, e.g. corpora, experimental data, or data from field work. Our goal is to reach a better understanding of information structural categories and their grammatical representation and surface realisation.

Interesting questions include, but are not limited to:

  • What information structural categories are necessary for describing, analysing, and modeling how information is structured or packaged in utterances: givenness/newness, focus, topic, contrast, frame setting (cf. Chafe 1976, Krifka 2008)?
  • How does one deal with optionality and redundancy in the grammatical marking of information structure?
  • How can information structure account for grammatical variation, e.g. word order variation in the left sentence periphery (a syntactic domain assumed to be important for the marking of IS categories, cf. e.g. Rizzi 1997)?
  • Are information structural categories gradable/continuous, e.g. can contrastive elements be more and less contrastive (e.g. Greif 2010), given elements more and less given (Hempelmann et al.'s (2005) newness scale), topics sole or conjoint (Cook & Bildhauer 2011)?
  • Cross-linguistically, which of the proposed categories have a measurable grammatical realisation? Are any of these categories universal?
  • How can different methods of psycholinguistics (e.g., experiments, field studies, etc.) tease apart which information structural categories facilitate language processing and how? How can difficulty in language processing be explained in terms of IS categories?
  • Which information structural categories (or sub-categories) can be reliably assigned using classification or clustering techniques? What knowledge is needed as input? Do categorisations differ with respect to difficulty? Regarding parallel corpora, how parallel are they with respect to information structural properties? Can information structural categories be projected from one language to another?

Call for papers:

We invite anonymous 1 page abstracts (references, examples and figures can be on a second page) for 30 minute presentations. Submissions should be in the following format: pdf format, A4 size, single spacing, the font must not be smaller than 12pt, at least 2,5cm margins on all sides. The name of the pdf file should be the title of the abstract: title.pdf

The body of the email should contain the following information:

  1. Name(s) of author(s)
  2. Title of talk
  3. Affiliation(s)
  4. E-mail address(es)

Invited speakers:

Manfred Krifka (Humboldt Universität)

Massimo Poesio (University of Essex / Università di Trento)

Important dates:

  • Deadline for abstract submissions: 23. September 2011
  • Notification of acceptance: 10. October 2011
  • Workshop: 02./03. December 2011

Registration:

Conference attendence is free of charge, but we ask attendees who are not presenting to please let us know that they are coming, in order to facilitate our planning.

References:

Chafe, Wallace L. (1976): Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics and point of view. In: C.N. Li (ed.): Subject and Topic. New York: Academic Press. 27-55.

Cook, Philippa and Felix Bildhauer (2011): Annotating information structure. The case of 'topic'. In: S. Dipper and H. Zinsmeister (eds.). Beyond Semantics. Corpus-based Investigations of Pragmatic and Discourse Phenomena. Bochumer Linguistische Arbeitsberichte 3, 45-56.

Greif, Markus (2010): Contrastive Focus in Mandarin Chinese. In: Speech Prosody 2010. Chicago, USA.

Hempelmann, Christian F., David Dufty, Philip M. McCarthy, Arthur C. Graesser, Zhiqiang Cai, and Danielle S. McNamara. 2005. Using LSA to automatically identify givenness and newness of noun-phrases in written discourse. In: B. Bara (ed.) Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meetings of the Cognitive Science Society, 941-949, Stresa, Italy. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Krifka, Manfred (2008): Basic notions of information structure. Acta Linguistica Hungarica, Vol. 55 (3-4). 243-276.

Rizzi, Luigi (1997): The fine structure of the left periphery. In: Liliane Haegeman (ed.): Elements of Grammar. Handbook in Generative Syntax. Dodrecht: Kluwer. 281-337.