This chapter presents field notes of the West Chadic language Ngizim, spoken in North-East Nigeria. In Ngizim, subject focus is indicated by subject inversion, whereas the word order of sentences with focused non-subjects can remain unchanged. The goal of the field work was to find out more about focus marking in Ngizim.

Natural language enables speakers to organize and highlight the information they want to convey. The linguistic analysis of this organization, known as Information Structure (Lambrecht, 1994), investigates the different strategies used in various languages to mark important information, such as focus constituents, within larger utterances. Research on K'ichee' has predominantly documented the syntactic strategies used to mark constituents for focus and has yet to analyze the role of intonation (Can Pixabaj & England, 2011). While the use of intonation in focus marking in different varieties of Spanish has received more attention than in K'ichee', the consideration of its role within bilingual contexts is under documented (O'Rourke, 2005; Simonet, 2008). This dissertation addresses these gaps in the literature by analyzing the intonational contours associated with contrastive focus constituents in both languages of Spanish-K'ichee' bilinguals and comparing these contours cross-linguistically. These analyses investigate different suprasegmental features of contrastive focus within different syntactic structures and their correlation with the individual level of language dominance of each bilingual. This study provides evidence that these bilinguals prosodically mark contrastive focus in both languages in similar ways. The first significant finding is that an earlier alignment of the intonational events, and not a greater pitch span, is the most consistently used strategy in both languages. Additionally, while a greater pitch span is not consistently used to mark contrastive focus, it is the only suprasegmental feature that is correlated with bilingual language dominance in both Spanish and K'ichee'. Finally, while some dialect-specific phonological features provide evidence of transfer between the two languages, the features that are the most similar in both languages and possibly the most prone to convergence are the same that are consistently used to mark contrastive focus, i.e., the alignment of intonational events. The present study contributes to the ongoing analyses of Information Structure, intonation, and bilingualism, and it is proposed that frameworks such as the Autosegmental-Metrical model of intonation (Pierrehumbert, 1980), Accomodation Theory (Giles & Powesland, 1975), and the Effort Code (Gussenhoven, 2004) can be extended to these findings on the role of the location of intonational events in both prosodic contrastive focus marking and convergence of intonational systems of bilinguals. / text

Results of a production experiment on the placement of sentence accent in German are reported. The hypothesis that German fulfills some of the most widely accepted rules of accent assignment— predicting focus domain integration—was only partly confirmed. Adjacency between argument and verb induces a single accent on the argument, as recognized in the literature, but interruption of this sequence by a modifier often induces remodeling of the accent pattern with a single accent on the modifier. The verb is rarely stressed. All models based on linear alignment or adjacency between elements belonging to a single accent domain fail to account for this result. A cyclic analysis of prosodic domain formation is proposed in an optimality-theoretic framework that can explain the accent pattern. Japanese <i>wh</i>-questions always exhibit focus intonation (FI). Furthermore, the domain of FI exhibits a correspondence to the <i>wh</i>-scope. I propose that this phonology-semantics correspondence is a result of the cyclic computation of FI, which is explained under the notion of <i>Multiple Spell-Out</i> in the recent Minimalist framework. The proposed analysis makes two predictions: (1) embedding of an FI into another is possible; (2) (overt) movement of a <i>wh</i>-phrase to a phase edge position causes a mismatch between FI and <i>wh</i>-scope. Both predictions are tested experimentally, and shown to be borne out.

In this paper we review the current state of research on the issue of discourse structure (DS)/information structure (IS) interface. This field has received a lot of attention from discourse semanticists and pragmatists, and has made substantial progress in recent years. In this paper we summarize the relevant studies. In addition, we look at the issue of DS/ISinteraction at a different level - that of phonetics. It is known that both information structure and discourse structure can be realized prosodically, but the issue of phonetic interaction between the prosodic devices they employ has hardly ever been discussed in this context. We think that a proper consideration of this aspect of DS/IS-interaction would enrich our understanding of the phenomenon, and hence we formulate some related research-programmatic positions.

This article presents a situation description production experiment investigating the interaction between syntax and information structure in Akan, a tone language that belongs to the Kwa branch of the Niger- Congo family spoken in Ghana. Information structure was elicited via context questions that put the object in narrow informational focus or narrow corrective focus while controlling for the tonal structure of the target word. Contrary to the prediction that corrective focus is marked by fronting and morphological marking of the focused constituent the data suggest that the in-situ strategy is the preferred one.

This is the 13th issue of the working paper series Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS) of the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 632. It is the first part of a series of Linguistic Fieldnote issues which present data collected by members of different projects of the SFB during fieldwork on various languages or dialects spoken worldwide. This part of the Fieldnote Series is dedicated to data from African languages. It contains contributions by Mira Grubic (A5) on Ngizim, and Susanne Genzel & Frank Kügler (D5) on Akan. The papers allow insights into various aspects of the elicitation of formal correlates of focus and related phenomena in different African languages investigated by the SFB in the second funding phase, especially in the period between 2007 and 2010.

The present dissertation proposes integrating Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), information structure (IS) and Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) into a single framework. It achieves this by making two new contributions to computational treatment of information structure. First, it presents an uncomplicated approach to incorporating information structure in DRT. Second, it shows how the new DRT representation can be integrated into a unification-based grammar framework in a straightforward manner. We foresee the main application of the new formalism to be in spoken language systems: the approach presented here has the potential to considerably facilitate spoken language systems benefiting from insights derived from information structure. The DRT representation with information structure which is proposed in this dissertation is simpler than the previous attempts to include information structure in DRT. We believe that the simplicity of the Information-Structure-marked Discourse Representation Structure (IS-DRS) is precisely what makes it attractive and easy to use for practical tasks like determining the intonation in spoken language applications. The IS component in ISDRS covers a range of aspects of information structural semantics. A further advantage of IS-DRS is that in its case a single semantic representation is suitable for both the generation of context-appropriate prosody and automatic reasoning. A semantic representation on its own is useful for describing and analysing a language. However, it is of even greater utility if it is accompanied by a mechanism that allows one to directly infer the semantic representation from a natural language expression. We incorporated the IS-DRS into the Categorial Grammar (CG) framework, developing a unification based realisation of Combinatory Categorial Grammar, which we call Unification-based Combinatory Categorial Grammar (UCCG). UCCG inherits elements from Combinatory Categorial Grammar and Unification Categorial Grammar. The UCCG framework is developed gradually throughout the dissertation. The information structural component is included as the final step. The IS-DRSs for linguistic expressions are built up compositionally from the IS-DRSs of their sub-expressions. Feature unification is the driving force in this process. The formalism is illustrated by numerous examples which are characterised by different levels of syntactic complexity and diverse information structure. We believe that the main assets of both the IS-DRSs as well as the Unification-based Combinatory Categorial Grammar framework are their simplicity, transparency, and inherent suitability for computational implementation. This makes them an appealing choice for use in practical applications like spoken language systems.

In the century or so that syllogisms have received the attention of psychologists, their interpretation both as and within particular types of discourse has been largely downplayed. A significant element in the guidance of interpretation is information structure as expressed in prosody. This thesis explores the role of intonation in syllogistic discourse and its effect on reasoning. A theoretical analysis of the information structures of syllogisms is presented which produces two classes of intonation patterns, the 'contextually concordant' (CC) and the 'contextually neutral' (CN), putatively corresponding to two discourse types. These are then investigated in a series of experiments. The initial observational study aims at confirming the use and significance of CC and CN patterns in a syllogism solving task. The remaining two experiments employ a purpose-built voice synthesiser to investigate the effects of imposing CC and CN contours on premises, first in a syllogism solving task and then in a syllogism evaluation task. The results show that both CC and CN intonation patterns are indeed used by participants and bear a systematic relationship to both the number and accuracy of conclusions they draw. When used in the presentation of syllogisms, however, these patterns do not influence the production of conclusions, only the evaluation of them. It is therefore argued that the discourse types to which they relate depend upon whether the syllogism is interpreted as a proof or as a problem. Further work based on these findings could aim to probe the informational links between conclusions and premises and thereby elucidate the coherence of arguments.

The paper presents work in progress on the interaction between information structure and word order in Old High German based on data from the Tatian translation (9th century). <br>The examination of the position of the finite verb in correspondence with the pragmatic status of discourse referents reveals an overall tendency for verb-initial order in thetic/all-focus sentences, whereas in categorical/topic-comment sentences verb-second placement with an initial topic constituent is preferred. <br>This conclusion provides support for the hypothesis stated in Donhauser & Hinterhölzl (2003) that the finite verb form in Early Germanic serves to distinguish the information-structural domains of Topic and Focus. <br>Finally, the investigation sheds light on the process of language change that led to the overall spread of verb-second in main clauses of modern German.

When we pay close attention to the prosody of Wh-questions in Japanese, we discover many novel and interesting empirical puzzles that would require us to devise a much finer syntactic component of grammar. This paper addresses the issues that pose some problems to such an elaborated grammar, and offers solutions, making an appeal to the information structure and sentence processing involved in the interpretation of interrogative and focus constructions.