LINGUIST List 20.3489
Fri Oct 16 2009
Calls: Ling Theories, Syntax, Phonology, Semantics/Poland
Editor for this issue: Kate Wu
<katelinguistlist.org>
1. Patrycja
Jablonska,
GLOW Workshop on Information Structure
Message 1: GLOW Workshop on Information Structure
Date: 15-Oct-2009
From: Patrycja Jablonska <patrjablyahoo.com>
Subject: GLOW Workshop on Information Structure
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Full Title: GLOW Workshop on Information Structure
Date: 13-Apr-2010 - 13-Apr-2010 Location: Wroclaw, Poland Contact Person: Gisbert Fanselow Meeting Email: fanselowuni-potsdam.de Web Site: http://www.ifa.uni.wroc.pl/~glow33
Linguistic Field(s): Linguistic Theories; Phonology; Semantics; Syntax
Call Deadline: 01-Nov-2009
Meeting Description:
GLOW Workshop on Information Structure Recursivity of Information Structure
Date: 13 April 2010 Organizers: Gisbert Fanselow, Caroline Fery, Manfred Krifka Invited Speakers: TBA Venue: Instytut Filologii Angielskiej, ul. Kuznicza 22, 50-138 Wroc?aw
2nd Call for Papers
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 todecide 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?
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