The 8th volume of the working paper series Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS) of the SFB 632 contains a collection of eight papers contributed by guest authors and SFB-members. The first paper on “Biased Questions” is an invited contribution by Nicholas Asher (CNRS, Laboratoire IRIT) & Brian Reese (University of Texas at Austin). Surveying English tag questions, negative polar questions, and what they term “focus” questions, they investigate the effects of prosody on discourse function and discourse structure and analyze the interaction between prosody and discourse in SDRT (Segmented Discourse Representation Theory). Stefan Hinterwimmer (A2) explores the interpretation of singular definites and universally quantified DPs in adverbially quantified English sentences. He suggests that the availability of a co-varying interpretation is more constrained in the case of universally quantified DPs than in the case of singular definites, because different from universally quantified DPs, co-varying definites are inherently focus-marked. The existence of striking similarities between topic/comment structure and bimanual coordination is pointed out and investigated by Manfred Krifka (A2). Showing how principles of bimanual coordination influence the expression of topic/comment structure beyond spoken language, he suggests that bimanual coordination might have been a preadaptation of the development of Information Structure in human communication. Among the different ways of expressing focus in Foodo, an underdescribed African Guang language of the Kwa family, the marked focus constructions are the central topic of the paper by Ines Fiedler (B1 & D2). Exploring the morphosyntactic facilities that Foodo has for focalization, she suggests that the two focus markers N and n have developed out of a homophone conjunction. Focus marking in another scarcely documented African tone language, the Gur language Konkomba, is treated by Anne Schwarz (B1 & D2). Comparing the two alleged focus markers lé and lá of the language, she argues that lé is better interpreted as a syntactic device rather than as a focus marker and shows that this analysis is corroborated by parallels in related languages. The reflexes of Information Structure in four different European languages (French, German, Greek and Hungarian) are compared and validated by Sam Hellmuth & Stavros Skopeteas (D2). The production data was collected with selected materials of the Questionnaire on Information Structure (QUIS) developed at the SFB. The results not only allow for an evaluation of the current elicitation paradigms, but also help to identify potentially fruitful venues of future research. Frank Kügler, Stavros Skopeteas (D2) & Elisabeth Verhoeven (University of Bremen) give an account of the encoding of Information Structure in Yucatec Maya, a Mayan tone language spoken on the Yucatecan peninsula in Mexico. The results of a production experiment lead them to the conclusion that focus is mainly expressed by syntax in this language. Stefanie Jannedy (D3) undertakes an instrumental investigation on the expressions and interpretation of focus in Vietnamese, a language of the Mon-Khmer family contrasting six lexical tones. The data strongly suggests that focus in Vietnamese is exclusively marked by prosody (intonational emphasis expressed via duration, f0 and amplitude) and that different focus conditions can reliably be recovered. This volume offers insights into current work conducted at the SFB 632, comprising empirical and theoretical aspects of Information Structure in a multitude of languages. Several of the papers mine field work data collected during the first phase of the SFB and explore the expression of Information Structure in tone and non-tone languages from various regions of the world.

Contents: Introduction (The Editors) Basic Notions of Information Structure (Manfred Krifka) Notions of Focus Anaphoricity (Mats Rooth) Topic and Focus: Two Structural Positions Associated with Logical Functions in the Left Periphery of the Hungarian Sentence (Katalin É. Kiss) Direct and Indirect Aboutness Topics (Cornelia Endriss & Stefan Hinterwimmer) Information Structure as Information-based Partition (Satoshi Tomioka) Focus Presuppositions (Dorit Abush) Contrastive Focus, Givenness and the Unmarked Status of “Discourse-new”(Elisabeth O. Selkirk) Contrastive Focus (Malte Zimmermann) The Fallacy of Invariant Phonological Correlates of Information Structural Notions (Caroline Féry) Notions and Subnotions of Information Structure (Carlos Gussenhoven) The Restricted Access of Information Structure to Syntax – A Minority Report (Gisbert Fanselow) Focus and Tone (Katharina Hartmann)

This paper investigates speech styles and style-shifting in the speech of the moderator of a German radio participation programme. Style-shifting is shown to affect several distinct linguistic levels: phonetic, morphophonemic, syntactic, and lexical. The functions of style-shifting are related both to the discourse context and the broader institutional context. Relying on listeners' co-occurrence expectations with respect to language use in contexts and exploiting listeners' evaluations of processes of speech convergence and divergence, the moderator uses stereotypic markers at different style levels in locally strategic functions in discourse. On the one hand, thematic development is controlled by reinforcing obligations on the addressee. On the other hand, global social reciprocity patterns are constituted and secured. Patterns of reciprocity vary with different types of addressees. The conversational analysis of language variation shows that variation is not only a quantitative correlate of regional, social and contextual parameters as predominantly conceived of in sociolinguistics. Language variation is furthermore used as a means to signal social and interactive meaning in conversations.

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Die vorliegende Textsammlung ist ein Versuch der Frage nachzugehen, wie sich mediale und formale Entdeckungen der Kunst damit verbinden, dass Potentiale in der Subjektivität des Rezipienten aufgerufen werden. Der Prozess der Selbstfindung des Subjekts durchzieht als philosophische Idee und als existentielle Selbstbehauptung die Geschichte der Kunst kontinuierlich seit ihrem Anfang. Das Vermögen der Kunst, Wirklichkeit entstehen zu lassen, ist stets auf Darstellungsprozesse angewiesen um wirksam werden zu können. Kunst ist die Weise der Welterzeugung, der man nur auf die Spur kommt, wenn man die internen Symbolsysteme erkennen lernt; denn Bilder und Sprachbilder sind textförmige Bedeutungsrealisierungen im Geflecht der symbolischen Ordnung, denn nur über poetische Konstruktionen wird uns die anthropologische Bedingtheit des Bewusstseins zugänglich. Der Mensch hat das Vermögen, zwischen sich und der Welt das Reich des Symbolischen zu schieben und vermag sich damit in den Symbolen selbst zu erkennen. So leben wir in vielen Wirklichkeiten, weil wir es nie unvermittelt mit "der Wirklichkeit" zu tun haben, sondern mit einer über Zeichen und Symbolen vermittelten Realität. Bilder und Sprache sind die relevanten Medien, die der Mensch zur Symbolbildung verwendet und damit einerseits Welt erschließt, andererseits auch Erinnerungen sowie Tradition und damit Kultur schafft. Daher bezieht Kunst ihre Gedächtniskraft, denn Kunst und Erinnerung sind eine einzige, unteilbare Größe. Im Zeigen und in der Kraft des Verweisens der Bilder und im diskursiven Sagen der Sprache wird es uns ermöglicht, vielfältige fiktive Wirklichkeiten zu entwerfen und damit die Imagination und Einbildungskraft anzuregen. Bilder und Sprache verweisen aufeinander, da Bilder durch ihre Form sprachähnlich werden. Zur Sprache werden sie Kraft ihrer Gestaltung, ohne in dieser aufzugehen. Bild- und Sprachmetaphern erwachsen aus vorgängiger Erfahrung und sind gleichsam das Kondensat kultureller Vergangenheit. Weltbilder der Kunst werden über kompositorische Schemata und Modelle konzipiert, um Wirklichkeit metaphorisch zu transformieren. Kunst verwendet damit ihre spiegelnde Wirkung dazu, dem Subjekt eine Identität zu verleihen, aber gleichzeitig zeigt sie ihm Wege und Möglichkeiten, der Falle der Verfügbarkeit zu entgehen. Diese Wege, die der Geschichte des Subjekts in seiner Selbstfindung und deren unterschiedlichen Folgen in Korrespondenz mit Kunst nachgeht, zeigen die Autoren dieses Bandes an subjektorientierten rezeptionsästhetischen Paradigmen auf.

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