Basic notions of information structure

This article takes stock of the basic notions of Information Structure (IS). It first provides a general characterization of IS — following Chafe (1976) — within a communicative model of Common Ground(CG), which distinguishes between CG content and CG management. IS is concerned with those features of language that concern the local CG. Second, this paper defines and discusses the notions of Focus (as indicating alternatives) and its various uses, Givenness (as indicating that a denotation is already present in the CG), and Topic (as specifying what a statement is about). It also proposes a new notion, Delimitation, which comprises contrastive topics and frame setters, and indicates that the current conversational move does not entirely satisfy the local communicative needs. It also points out that rhetorical structuring partly belongs to IS.Peer Reviewe

In need of mediation: The relation between syntax and information structure

This paper defends the view that syntax does not directly interact with information structure. Rather, information structure affects prosody, and only the latter has an interface with syntax. We illustrate this point by discussing scrambling, focus preposing, and topicalization. The position entertained here implies that syntax is not very informative when one wants to narrow down the interpretation of terms such as “focus”, “topic”, etc

Generalized Quantifiers on Dependent Types: A System for Anaphora

We propose a system for the interpretation of anaphoric relationships between unbound pronouns and quantifiers. The main technical contribution of our proposal consists in combining generalized quantifiers with dependent types. Empirically, our system allows a uniform treatment of all types of unbound anaphora, including the notoriously difficult cases such as quantificational subordination, cumulative and branching continuations, and 'donkey anaphora'.Comment: 40 pages; final versio

Grammatical meaning and the second language classroom : introduction

This special issue assembles empirical work on second language teaching and learning from a generative linguistic perspective. The focus is on properties that constitute grammar–meaning interaction, that differ in the native and target language grammars, and that have not been highlighted in the pedagogical literature so far. Common topics address whether and how learners acquire grammatical meanings in the second language, including difficult misalignments between native and target-language constructions and functional morphemes. We propose that teaching and learning a second language can be enhanced by focusing on the relationship between grammatical forms and their meanings, as elucidated by contemporary linguistic theory

What is the Value of Vagueness?

Classically, vagueness has been considered something bad. It leads to the Sorites paradox, borderline cases, and the (apparent) violation of the logical principle of bivalence. Nevertheless, there have always been scholars claiming that vagueness is also valuable. Many have pointed out that we could not communicate as successfully or efficiently as we do if we would not use vague language. Indeed, we often use vague terms when we could have used more precise ones instead. Many scholars (implicitly or explicitly) assume that we do so because their vagueness has a positive function. But how and in what sense can vagueness be said to have a function or value? This paper is an attempt to give an answer to this question. After clarifying the concepts of vagueness and value, it examines nine arguments for the value of vagueness, which have been discussed in the literature. The (negative) result of this examination is, however, that there is not much reason to believe that vagueness has a value or positive function at all because none of the arguments is conclusive. A tenth argument that has not been discussed so far seems most promising but rests on a solely strategic notion of function

Data-based analysis of speech and gesture: the Bielefeld Speech and Gesture Alignment corpus (SaGA) and its applications

Lücking A, Bergmann K, Hahn F, Kopp S, Rieser H. Data-based analysis of speech and gesture: the Bielefeld Speech and Gesture Alignment corpus (SaGA) and its applications. Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces. 2013;7(1-2):5-18.Communicating face-to-face, interlocutors frequently produce multimodal meaning packages consisting of speech and accompanying gestures. We discuss a systematically annotated speech and gesture corpus consisting of 25 route-and-landmark-description dialogues, the Bielefeld Speech and Gesture Alignment corpus (SaGA), collected in experimental face-to-face settings. We first describe the primary and secondary data of the corpus and its reliability assessment. Then we go into some of the projects carried out using SaGA demonstrating the wide range of its usability: on the empirical side, there is work on gesture typology, individual and contextual parameters influencing gesture production and gestures’ functions for dialogue structure. Speech-gesture interfaces have been established extending unification-based grammars. In addition, the development of a computational model of speech-gesture alignment and its implementation constitutes a research line we focus on