LOT Winter School 2005 Groningen, The Netherlands, January 10-21, 2005

The interaction between syntax, information structure, and intonation is turning into one of the hot spots in theoretical and computational linguistic research. There is a growing awareness that empirically adequate linguistic analyses require all three modules of linguistic representation to be expressed in an architecture supporting constraints within and across the modules. And results of this linguistic research have started to inform computational work, e.g., on the generation of contextually appropriate syntax and intonation in dialog systems.

The course introduces and compares current approaches to the syntax information structure interface in three formal linguistic frameworks: Lexical-Functional Grammar (Choi, Holloway-King), Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Engdahl & Vallduví, De Kuthy & Meurers), and Combinatory Categorial Grammar (Steedman). After an introduction to the idea of information-packaging, the course turns to case studies highlighting how syntactic, pragmatic, and intonational constraints are expressed in the different frameworks, and how their interaction is captured. A brief introduction into each framework is included.

Returning to the need for empirically adequate linguistic analyses mentioned in the beginning, the course will end with a discussion of the question how corpus data can be used to inform linguistic research, and what is involved in expressing queries for theoretically relevant classes of data.

The following is an overview of the topics that will be discussed in the course, the publications which the individual lectures will be based on, and some additional reading material.

• Part 1: "Introduction: Information Structure and What It's Good For." (slides.pdf)
  • Ivana Kruijff-Korbayova and Mark Steedman (2003). Discourse and Information Structure. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 12. 249-259.
  • Chapter 3 of Klaus von Heusinger (1999). Intonation and Information Structure. The Representation of Focus in Phonology and Semantics. Habilitationssschrift, Universität Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany.

• Part 2: "Approaches in Lexical-Functional Grammar" (slides.pdf)
  • Hye-Won Choi (1997): Information Structure, Phrase Structure, and Their Interface. Proceedings of the LFG'97 Conference. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
  • Tracy Holloway King (1997): Focus Domains and Information Structure. Proceedings of the LFG'97 Conference. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
  • Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King (1996). Structural Topic and Focus Without Movement. In Proceedings of the LFG'96 Conference. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
  • Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King (1997). Null Elements in Discourse Structure. In K. V. Subbarao (ed.) Papers from the NULLS Seminar. Delhi: Motilal Banarasidas

• Part 3: "Approaches in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar" (slides.pdf)
  • Elisabet Engdahl (1999). Integrating Pragmatics into the Grammar. In Lunella Mereu (ed.) Boundaries of Morphology and Syntax. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 175-194.
  • Kordula De Kuthy (2002). Discontinuous NPs in German. A Case Study of the Interaction of Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Chapter 6.6.
  • Kordula De Kuthy and Walt Detmar Meurers (2003). The Secret Life of Focus Exponents, and What It Tells Us about Fronted Verbal Projections. In Proceedings of the Tenth Int. Conference on HPSG. pp. 97-110. CSLI Publications.

• Part 4: "Approaches in Categorial Grammar (an related work)" (slides.pdf)
  • Mark Steedman (2000): ``Information Structure and the Syntax-Phonology Interface''. Linguistic Inquiry 31 (4). 649-689.

  other relevant work we will touch on:

  • Baldridge, Jason and Geert-Jan Kruijff (2002). Coupling CCG with Hybrid Logic Dependency Semantics. In Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-02). Philadelphia, PA.
  • Kruijff, Geert-Jan and Jason Baldridge (2004). Generalizing Dimensionality in Combinatory Categorial Grammar. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-04). Geneva.
  • Kruijff, Geert-Jan M. (2001). A Categorial-Modal Architecture of Informativity: Dependency Grammar Logic and Information Structure. Ph.D. thesis, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic.

• Part 5: "Comparing, Evaluating, and Where Do We Go From Here?" (slides.pdf)
  • Steve Pulman (1997), ``Higher Order Unification and the Interpretation of Focus''. Linguistics and Philosophy 20. 73-115, in particular pages 73-87.

• Part 6: "How to search in corpora for linguistically relevant data" (slides.pdf)
  • Detmar Meurers (in press). ``On the use of electronic corpora for theoretical linguistics. Case studies from the syntax of German''. Lingua.