Recursivity of information structure
Date: 13 April 2010
Organizers: Gisbert Fanselow, Caroline Féry, Shinichiro Ishihara
Deadline for abstract submission: 1st
December
Abstracts submitted
to: joanna.blaszczak@googlemail.com
Invited Speakers: TBA
Venue: Instytut Filologii Angielskiej, ul. Kuźnicza 22,
50-138 Wrocław
Programme
Abstracts
Information structure has been thoroughly studied in many respects, but, surprisingly, hierarchical aspects have not received the attention they deserve. Some remarks supporting a hierarchical organization of information structure can be found in Rooth (1992, 2006) and Krifka (1999), while other researchers are inclined to assume a non-recursive model for information structure (see Tomioka 2006 for relevant discussion). Contributions to the workshop should present evidence from phonology, syntax, or semantics that allows to decide whether grammar involves a hierarchical and recursive information ‘structure’ or merely a flat, non-recursive information ‘partition’. The following topics exemplify the kinds of questions that we hope will be addressed in the workshop (though the list is, of course, not meant to be exhaustive).
Can the different types of information partitioning (e.g., topic-comment, focus-background) enter a subordination relation (as argued in, e.g., Neeleman & de Koot 2008), and if so, is their combinatorial potential constrained in a grammatical rather than conceptual sense?
In Japanese, a topic may follow the subject or occupy the sentence initial position. In German, topics show up in different slots, as well. These multiple options raise the issue of whether slots related to information structure are present both in CP and in vP, the two derivational phases proposed by Chomsky (2005). Is there a syntactic and prosodic difference between the two layers of IS in a clause? Can these options be realized at the same time? Is it only the phases, that may host IS-related categories? If so, why do phases have such a privileged status? Is this property related to their status as domains of Spellout?Topic and focus refer to the common ground of an utterance and are as such main clause phenomena, but elements bearing the expressive characteristics of topics and foci appear in embedded clauses. If this argues for complex hierarchical relations among the elements bearing markers of information structure, the question is how these relations are encoded prosodically, what roles accent and phrasing play in this respect, how registers are employed and whether their use in complex information structure is different from simple recursive structure, and how various F0-compression operations are integrated into such a model
How do recursion and cyclicity in syntax and prosody relate to each other? Recursivity has long been considered to be one of the core properties of syntax. As for prosody, the Strict Layer Hypothesis states that prosodic structure has a limited number of layers, and that recursivity is either excluded entirely from the prosodic component or that it is strictly limited (see Selkirk 2000 for instance). Can this view be maintained in the light of evidence from the hierarchical organization of information structure?
Chomsky, Noam. 2005. On Phases. Ms., MIT.
Krifka, Manfred. 1999. Additive particles under stress. Proceedings of
SALT 8. Cornell, CLC Publications, 111–128.
Neeleman,Ad., van de Koot, Hans. 2008. Dutch Scrambling and the Nature
of Discourse Templates. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics
11(2), 137-189
Rooth, Mats. 1992. A Theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language
Semantics 1: 75–116.
Rooth, Mats. 2006. Notions of focus anaphoricity. In Féry, Caroline,
Gisbert Fanselow, and Manfred Krifka (eds.) 2007. Notions of
information structure, ISIS 6. Potsdam: University of Potsdam.
Selkirk, Elisabeth O. 2000 The Interaction of Constraints on Prosodic
Phrasing. In: Horne, Merle (ed.) Prosody: Theory and
Experiment. Dordrecht. Kluwer. 231-261.
Tomioka, Satoshi. 2006. Information Structure as Information-based
Partition. In Féry et al. (eds.) ISIS 6.
Abstracts should be sent in two copies: one with a name and one without as attached files (the name(s) should also be clearly mentioned in the e-mail) to: fanselow@uni-potsdam.de in .pdf format.
Only electronic submissions will be considered. Deadline for submissions: December 1, 2009. Abstracts may not exceed two pages of text with at least a one-inch margin on all four sides (measured on A4 paper) and must employ a font not smaller than 12 point. Each page may include a maximum of 50 lines of text. An additional page with references may be included.