Information Structure:
Overview and Comparison

Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová

Series of lectures at MPI Nijmegen, October/November 2007

[introduction] [reading list] [roadmap]

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Introduction

The goal of this course is to help students and researchers to orient themselves in the large amount of literature on information structure, by providing them with a basic understanding of a range of various approaches and the notions they work with, and by surveying existing attempts at operationalizing IS.

IS concerns utterance-internal structural and semantic properties reflecting the relation of an utterance to the discourse context. IS is therefore an important aspect of meaning at the interface between utterance and discourse. Among the dichotomies used to describe IS are Theme-Rheme, Topic-Comment, Topic-Focus, Backround-Focus, Given-New and Contextually Bound-Nonbound.

Languages differ in how they employ various means of IS realization, such as intonation, word order, syntactic constructions or morphological marking. Modelling these phenomena and their interaction in the grammar requires understanding IS and its role in discourse.

Studying and modelling the interaction of discourse and IS is made difficult by proliferating and often under-formalized terminologies, especially for IS. What is needed is further systematization of the diverse terminologies, formalization, and empirical and corpus-based studies.

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Reading List

There is actually no required reading for the course. But if you do want to read something to prepare, then here is a very selective reading list you can start with:

• Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová and Mark Steedman. Discourse and information structure. In: Journal of Logic, Language and Information. Special Issue on Discourse and Information Structure, 12(3):249-259. 2003. [PDF (prepublication version)]
• Eva Hajicová: Issues of sentence structure and discourse patterns. Chapter 2. Volume 2 of Theoretical and Computational Linguistics. Charles University Press, Prague, Czech Republic. 1993. [Available here: scans]
• Ellen Prince. 1981. Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. In: Peter Cole, editor, Radical Pragmatics, pages 223-256. Academic Press. [PDF]
• Tania Reinhart. Pragmatics and Linguistics: An Analysis of Sentence Topics. In: Philosophica, Vol. 27, No. l, Special Issue on Pragmatic Theory, l98l, 53-93. Distributed also by Indiana University Linguistics Club.
• Michael A. K. Halliday. 1967. Notes on transitivity and theme in English - Part 2. Journal of Linguistics, 3(1 and 2):37-81 and 199-244. [Available here: scans]
• Enric Vallduví and Elisabet Engdahl. 1996. The linguistic realization of information packaging. In: Linguistics, 34:459-519. [PDF]
• Mark Steedman. Information structure and the syntax-phonology interface. In: Linguistic Inquiry. 2000. [GZipped PS (prepublication version)]

These readins are repeated below with the lectures for which they are most relevant.

A much more extensive reading list by subject is available here.

A full bibliography for the present lectures is here (now in the final version).

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Roadmap

[Lect 1, Mo 5.11.07] Slides: [PDF] P.S. Focussing Jokes: [PDF]
Information Structure: an inherent aspect of utterance meaning.

Basic reading:
Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová and Mark Steedman. Discourse and information structure. In: Journal of Logic, Language and Information. Special Issue on Discourse and Information Structure, 12(3):249-259. 2003. [PDF (prepublication version)]

[Lect 2, Fr 9.11.07] Slides: [PDF]
IS semantics. IS realization means. So many approaches to IS ...

Basic readings:
Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová and Mark Steedman. Discourse and information structure. In: Journal of Logic, Language and Information. Special Issue on Discourse and Information Structure, 12(3):249-259. 2003. [PDF (prepublication version)]

Enric Vallduví and Elisabet Engdahl. 1996. The linguistic realization of information packaging. In: Linguistics, 34:459-519. [PDF]

[Lect 3, Mo 12.11.07] Slides: [PDF]
IS in the Prague School and follow-up. Topic-Focus Articulation, contextual boundness, communicative dynamism.

Basic reading:
Eva Hajicová: Issues of sentence structure and discourse patterns. Chapter 3. Volume 2 of Theoretical and Computational Linguistics. Charles University Press, Prague, Czech Republic. 1993. [Available here: scans]

[Lect 4, Tu 13.11.07] Slides: [PDF]
Salience in common ground, various notions of information status (e.g., familiarity, givenness, etc.)

Basic readings:
Ellen Prince. 1981. Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. In: Peter Cole, editor, Radical Pragmatics, pages 223-256. Academic Press. [PDF]

Tania Reinhart. Pragmatics and Linguistics: An Analysis of Sentence Topics. In: Philosophica, Vol. 27, No. l, Special Issue on Pragmatic Theory, l98l, 53-93. Distributed also by Indiana University Linguistics Club.

[Lect 5, We 14.11.07] Slides: [PDF]
Halliday's Thematic- vs. Information-Structure. Thematic sequences.

Basic reading:
Michael A. K. Halliday. 1967. Notes on transitivity and theme in English - Part 2. Journal of Linguistics, 3(1 and 2):37-81 and 199-244. [Available here: scans]

[Lect 6, Th 15.11.07] Slides: [PDF]
Vallduví's Information Packaging. File-Change Semantics of IS.

Basic reading:
Enric Vallduví and Elisabet Engdahl. 1996. The linguistic realization of information packaging. In: Linguistics, 34:459-519. [PDF]

[Lect 7, Fr 16.11.07] Slides: [PDF]
Steedman's two dimensions of IS. Alternative-set semantics of IS. IS and Intonation. IS and turn-taking, gesture and gaze in dialog.

Basic reading:
Mark Steedman. Information structure and the syntax-phonology interface. In: Linguistic Inquiry. 2000. [GZipped PS (prepublication version)]

[Lect 8, 19.11.07] Slides: [PDF]
Aligning IS approaches. Practical evaluation. Corpus annotation.

Basic reading:
Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová and Mark Steedman. Discourse and information structure. In: Journal of Logic, Language and Information. Special Issue on Discourse and Information Structure, 12(3):249-259. 2003. [PDF (prepublication version)]

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