This volume contains the proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Prosody, Syntax, and Information Structure (WPSI2), held at University of Potsdam on March 18, 2005. WPSI 2 was aimed to discuss issues on the interaction of prosody, syntax, and information structure, from interdisciplinary points of view. The contributors (Haruo Kubozono, Shinichiro Ishihara, Yoshihisa Kitagawa, and Satoshi Tomioka) have been recently working on relevant issues, especially looking at the phenomena related to the intonation of focus and (wh-)questions in Japanese.

This paper reports on pilot work on the expression of Information Structure in Vietnamese and argues that Focus in Vietnamese is exclusively expressed prosodically: there are no specific focus markers, and the language uses phonology to express intonational emphasis in similar ways to languages like English or German. The exploratory data indicates that (i) focus is prosodically expressed while word order remains constant, (ii) listeners show good recoverability of the intended focus structure, and (iii) that there is a trading relationship between several phonetic parameters (duration, f0, amplitude) involved to signal prosodic (acoustic) emphasis.

The paper presents a novel approach to explaining word order variation in the early Germanic languages. Initial observations about verb placement as a device marking types of rhetorical relations made on data from Old High German (cf. Hinterhölzl & Petrova 2005) are now reconsidered on a larger scale and compared with evidence from other early Germanic languages. The paper claims that the identification of information-structural domains in a sentence is best achieved by taking into account the interaction between the pragmatic features of discourse referents and properties of discourse organization.

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.

Recent models of Information Structure (IS) identify a low level contrast feature that functions within the topic and focus of the utterance. This study investigates the exact nature of this feature based on empirical evidence from a controlled read speech experiment on the prosodic realization of different levels of contrast in Modern Greek. Results indicate that only correction is truly contrastive, and that it is similarly realized in both topic and focus, suggesting that contrast is an independent IS dimension. Non default focus position is further identified as a parameter that triggers a prosodically marked rendition, similar to correction.

This paper proposes a novel analysis of the Russian OVS construction and argues that the parametric variation in the availability of OVS cross-linguistically depends on the type of relative interpretative argument prominence that a language encodes via syntactic structure. When thematic and information-structural prominence relations do not coincide, only one of them can be structurally/linearly represented. The relation that is not structurally/linearly encoded must be made visible at the PF interface either via prosody or morphology.

This study investigates the syntactic structures and informational properties of English it-cleft and Chinese shi....(de) structure in the English novel The Fellowship of the Ring and its Chinese translation Å]§Ù­º³¡¦±. In previous studies, Chinese shi...(de) structure is generally regarded as a cleft sentence, and is equivalent to English it-cleft. However, in the present study, examination of it-cleft in the English novel and its Chinese shi...(de) translation supports the observation that Chinese shi...(de) structure is not equivalent to English it-cleft, but should be treated as a predicational sentence (Lambrechet 2008 and Shyu 2008). The data for analysis consist of 208 Chinese shi...(de) entries in the Chinese text and 48 English it-clefts in the English text. The results reveal that the Chinese translation contains a noticeably higher number of shi...(de) structures than the English text contains it-clefts, with the proportion of Chinese shi...(de) structures five times greater than English it-clefts (84.5% vs.19.5%). The discrepancy is ascribed to two reasons. First, Chinese shi...(de) structure is treated as a predicational sentence involving the three focus types: Predicate Focus (PF), Sentence Focus (SF), and Argument Focus (IF) (Lambrecht 1994, 2001). Second, English interrogative construction tends to be translated to Chinese shi...(de) structure. Another issue concerns how the four informational properties account for the differences between English it-cleft and Chinese shi...(de) sentence: the stress-focused cleft, the informative presupposition cleft, the discontinuous cleft, and the emphatic cleft. It is observed that these four functional properties can be comparable with Lambrecht¡¦s three focus types, and that they can be used to determine the real focus in the scope of shi...(de), without concerning ambiguous problems among subject focus, sentence focus and adjunct focus.

This thesis proposes to improve and enrich the expressiveness of English Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis by identifying and generating natural patterns of prosodic prominence. In most state-of-the-art TTS systems the prediction from text of prosodic prominence relations between words in an utterance relies on features that very loosely account for the combined effects of syntax, semantics, word informativeness and salience, on prosodic prominence. To improve prosodic prominence prediction we first follow up the classic approach in which prosodic prominence patterns are flattened into binary sequences of pitch accented and pitch unaccented words. We propose and motivate statistic and syntactic dependency based features that are complementary to the most predictive features proposed in previous works on automatic pitch accent prediction and show their utility on both read and spontaneous speech. Different accentuation patterns can be associated to the same sentence. Such variability rises the question on how evaluating pitch accent predictors when more patterns are allowed. We carry out a study on prosodic symbols variability on a speech corpus where different speakers read the same text and propose an information-theoretic definition of optionality of symbolic prosodic events that leads to a novel evaluation metric in which prosodic variability is incorporated as a factor affecting prediction accuracy. We additionally propose a method to take advantage of the optionality of prosodic events in unit-selection speech synthesis. To better account for the tight links between the prosodic prominence of a word and the discourse/sentence context, part of this thesis goes beyond the accent/no-accent dichotomy and is devoted to a novel task, the automatic detection of contrast, where contrast is meant as a (Information Structure’s) relation that ties two words that explicitly contrast with each other. This task is mainly motivated by the fact that contrastive words tend to be prosodically marked with particularly prominent pitch accents. The identification of contrastive word pairs is achieved by combining lexical information, syntactic information (which mainly aims to identify the syntactic parallelism that often activates contrast) and semantic information (mainly drawn from the Word- Net semantic lexicon), within a Support Vector Machines classifier. Once we have identified patterns of prosodic prominence we propose methods to incorporate such information in TTS synthesis and test its impact on synthetic speech naturalness trough some large scale perceptual experiments. The results of these experiments cast some doubts on the utility of a simple accent/no-accent distinction in Hidden Markov Model based speech synthesis while highlight the importance of contrastive accents.

Esta pesquisa tem por finalidade analisar as construções sentenciais de tópico-comentário, de tópico marcado e de tópico não marcado, em produções textuais de estudantes do sexto ao nono anos do segundo segmento do ensino fundamental de escola pública localizada em comunidade da Zona Oeste do Rio de Janeiro, tendo sido analisadas 316 produções de um universo de 1040. O aporte teórico é o Funcionalismo, com ênfase na teoria dos três diferentes tipos de sujeito Sujeito Lógico, Sujeito Psicológico e Sujeito gramatical de Halliday (1994) e na teoria da Estrutura Informacional (Information Structure) de Lambrecht (1994). Partindo de análise quantitativa e qualitativa de corpus, investigou-se, de um lado, o percentual de aparecimento de construções de tópico marcado e não marcado e, de outro, os diferentes tipos de tópico não marcado e as motivações sintáticas e pragmático-discursivas de sua utilização. A análise foi feita em duas etapas. Primeiramente, para a identificação e a quantificação das construções sentenciais de tópico marcado, procedeu-se à investigação das seguintes variáveis: 1) tipo de tópico marcado mais recorrente, segundo categorização específica referente ao tópico e suas relações argumentais com o verbo 2) Posição mais frequente, considerando a estrutura textual e a ambiência sintática de favorecimento do uso do pronome correferente (presença/ausência de sintagma ou oração intercalada entre tópico sentencial e pronome correferente). A fim de investigar os contextos favorecedores de uso dos tópicos não marcados sujeito pronominal pleno de 3 pessoa e sujeito pronominal nulo de 3 pessoa, consideraram-se as seguintes variáveis: 1) tipo de oração e 2) conexão discursiva cf. Paredes Silva (2003). Os resultados obtidos permitem sistematizar as condições de uso das estruturas estudadas. Com relação às construções sentenciais de tópico marcado, verificou-se que se constitui em estratégia de ativar no discurso o elemento sobre o qual informações novas serão transmitidas, marcando-o como o tópico sentencial. Relativamente aos tópicos não marcados, as estratégias de uso estão relacionadas ao tipo de oração e ao grau de conexão discursiva da sentença. O uso do sujeito nulo está diretamente relacionado à conexão discursiva de grau 1, denominado ótimo. Uma breve análise de tais construções em autores consagrados da literatura brasileira e demais autores brasileiros contemporâneos permite afirmar que as construções de tópico, principalmente as que contêm tópico marcado, merecem uma atenção maior no ensino de Língua Portuguesa, uma vez que constituem uma estratégia pragmático-discursiva de uso corrente e de função relevante nos processos interacionais. O estudo das construções de tópico, portanto, merece uma atenção especial, uma vez que refletem a riqueza de nosso idioma, ao representar uma estratégia pragmático-discursiva que, se bem desenvolvida, constituir-se-á em uma ferramenta a mais para o usuário da língua no que concerne ao uso consciente e competente do idioma materno / The present study aims at analyzing sentence constructions of commentary topic, marked-topic and unmarked topic in textual productions of students attending the last four years of elementary education in a public school located in a poor community in the West zone of Rio de Janeiro. 316 out of 1040 productions have been analyzed. Functionalism has been used as the theoretical background with special emphasis on three different types of subject the Logical Subject, the Psychological Subject and the Grammatical Subject - Halliday (1994) and on Lambrechts information structure (1994). Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the corpus, we have investigated, on the one hand, the percentage of marked and non-marked topic construction appearances and, on the other hand, the different types of non-marked topics and the syntactic and pragmatic discursive motivations of their usage. The analysis has been done in two stages. Firstly, for the identification and quantification of sentence constructions of marked topics, the investigation of the following variables has been made: 1st) most recurrent marked topic, according to specific categorization referring to the topic and its argumentative relationship with the verb, 2nd) most frequent position, taking into account the textual structure and the syntactic ambience of favoring the use of the coreferent pronoun (presence / absence of the syntagma or intercalated clause between sentence topic and coreferent pronoun). In order to investigate favoring contexts of the use of non-marked topics of 3rd person full pronominal subject and 3rd person null pronominal subject, the following variables have been considered: 1st) type of clause and 2nd) discursive connection, Paredes Silva (2003). The results obtained allow us to systematize the use conditions of the studied structures. When it comes to the sentence constructions of marked topic, we could perceive that it is a strategy of activating in the discourse the element about which the new information will be transmitted, marking it as the sentence topic. When it comes to non-marked topics, the strategies of use are related to the type of clause and to the degree of discursive connection of the sentence. The use of the null subject is directly related to the discursive connection degree 1, which is considered great. A brief analysis of such constructions in works of renowned authors in the field of Brazilian literature and other contemporary Brazilian authors allow us to say that topic constructions, especially the ones that contain marked topics, deserve greater attention in the education of Portuguese language, since they represent a pragmatic discursive strategy which is relevant and commonly used in interactional processes. Therefore, the study of topic construction deserves special attention since it reflects the richness of our language when it represents a pragmatic discursive strategy that, if well developed, can be one more tool for the language user when it comes to the conscientious and competent use of the mother tongue

Esta pesquisa tem por finalidade analisar as construções sentenciais de tópico-comentário, de tópico marcado e de tópico não marcado, em produções textuais de estudantes do sexto ao nono anos do segundo segmento do ensino fundamental de escola pública localizada em comunidade da Zona Oeste do Rio de Janeiro, tendo sido analisadas 316 produções de um universo de 1040. O aporte teórico é o Funcionalismo, com ênfase na teoria dos três diferentes tipos de sujeito Sujeito Lógico, Sujeito Psicológico e Sujeito gramatical de Halliday (1994) e na teoria da Estrutura Informacional (Information Structure) de Lambrecht (1994). Partindo de análise quantitativa e qualitativa de corpus, investigou-se, de um lado, o percentual de aparecimento de construções de tópico marcado e não marcado e, de outro, os diferentes tipos de tópico não marcado e as motivações sintáticas e pragmático-discursivas de sua utilização. A análise foi feita em duas etapas. Primeiramente, para a identificação e a quantificação das construções sentenciais de tópico marcado, procedeu-se à investigação das seguintes variáveis: 1) tipo de tópico marcado mais recorrente, segundo categorização específica referente ao tópico e suas relações argumentais com o verbo 2) Posição mais frequente, considerando a estrutura textual e a ambiência sintática de favorecimento do uso do pronome correferente (presença/ausência de sintagma ou oração intercalada entre tópico sentencial e pronome correferente). A fim de investigar os contextos favorecedores de uso dos tópicos não marcados sujeito pronominal pleno de 3 pessoa e sujeito pronominal nulo de 3 pessoa, consideraram-se as seguintes variáveis: 1) tipo de oração e 2) conexão discursiva cf. Paredes Silva (2003). Os resultados obtidos permitem sistematizar as condições de uso das estruturas estudadas. Com relação às construções sentenciais de tópico marcado, verificou-se que se constitui em estratégia de ativar no discurso o elemento sobre o qual informações novas serão transmitidas, marcando-o como o tópico sentencial. Relativamente aos tópicos não marcados, as estratégias de uso estão relacionadas ao tipo de oração e ao grau de conexão discursiva da sentença. O uso do sujeito nulo está diretamente relacionado à conexão discursiva de grau 1, denominado ótimo. Uma breve análise de tais construções em autores consagrados da literatura brasileira e demais autores brasileiros contemporâneos permite afirmar que as construções de tópico, principalmente as que contêm tópico marcado, merecem uma atenção maior no ensino de Língua Portuguesa, uma vez que constituem uma estratégia pragmático-discursiva de uso corrente e de função relevante nos processos interacionais. O estudo das construções de tópico, portanto, merece uma atenção especial, uma vez que refletem a riqueza de nosso idioma, ao representar uma estratégia pragmático-discursiva que, se bem desenvolvida, constituir-se-á em uma ferramenta a mais para o usuário da língua no que concerne ao uso consciente e competente do idioma materno / The present study aims at analyzing sentence constructions of commentary topic, marked-topic and unmarked topic in textual productions of students attending the last four years of elementary education in a public school located in a poor community in the West zone of Rio de Janeiro. 316 out of 1040 productions have been analyzed. Functionalism has been used as the theoretical background with special emphasis on three different types of subject the Logical Subject, the Psychological Subject and the Grammatical Subject - Halliday (1994) and on Lambrechts information structure (1994). Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the corpus, we have investigated, on the one hand, the percentage of marked and non-marked topic construction appearances and, on the other hand, the different types of non-marked topics and the syntactic and pragmatic discursive motivations of their usage. The analysis has been done in two stages. Firstly, for the identification and quantification of sentence constructions of marked topics, the investigation of the following variables has been made: 1st) most recurrent marked topic, according to specific categorization referring to the topic and its argumentative relationship with the verb, 2nd) most frequent position, taking into account the textual structure and the syntactic ambience of favoring the use of the coreferent pronoun (presence / absence of the syntagma or intercalated clause between sentence topic and coreferent pronoun). In order to investigate favoring contexts of the use of non-marked topics of 3rd person full pronominal subject and 3rd person null pronominal subject, the following variables have been considered: 1st) type of clause and 2nd) discursive connection, Paredes Silva (2003). The results obtained allow us to systematize the use conditions of the studied structures. When it comes to the sentence constructions of marked topic, we could perceive that it is a strategy of activating in the discourse the element about which the new information will be transmitted, marking it as the sentence topic. When it comes to non-marked topics, the strategies of use are related to the type of clause and to the degree of discursive connection of the sentence. The use of the null subject is directly related to the discursive connection degree 1, which is considered great. A brief analysis of such constructions in works of renowned authors in the field of Brazilian literature and other contemporary Brazilian authors allow us to say that topic constructions, especially the ones that contain marked topics, deserve greater attention in the education of Portuguese language, since they represent a pragmatic discursive strategy which is relevant and commonly used in interactional processes. Therefore, the study of topic construction deserves special attention since it reflects the richness of our language when it represents a pragmatic discursive strategy that, if well developed, can be one more tool for the language user when it comes to the conscientious and competent use of the mother tongue