16.1738, Review: Semantics/Pragmatics: Steube (2004)

[LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-16-1738. Fri Jun 03 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.1738, Review: Semantics/Pragmatics: Steube (2004)

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Wayne State U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>
 
Reviews (reviews at linguistlist.org) 
        Sheila Dooley, U of Arizona  
        Terry Langendoen, U of Arizona  

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, Wayne
State University, and donations from subscribers and publishers.

Editor for this issue: Naomi Ogasawara <naomi at linguistlist.org>
================================================================  

What follows is a review or discussion note contributed to our 
Book Discussion Forum. We expect discussions to be informal and 
interactive; and the author of the book discussed is cordially 
invited to join in. If you are interested in leading a book 
discussion, look for books announced on LINGUIST as "available 
for review." Then contact Sheila Dooley at collberg at linguistlist.org. 

===========================Directory==============================  

1)
Date: 02-Jun-2005
From: Maarika Traat < maarika at gmail.com >
Subject: Information Structure: Theoretical and Empirical Aspects 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Fri, 03 Jun 2005 02:31:37
From: Maarika Traat < maarika at gmail.com >
Subject: Information Structure: Theoretical and Empirical Aspects 
 

EDITOR: Steube, Anita
TITLE: Information Structure
SUBTITLE: Theoretical and Empirical Aspects
SERIES: Language, Context & Cognition 1
PUBLISHER: Mouton de Gruyter
YEAR: 2004
ISBN: 3110179342
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-2871.html


Maarika Traat, School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh

[Note: The symbols ~, A, and E are used for logical negation, universal 
quantification and existential quantification respectively. -- Eds.]

INTRODUCTION

The book is a collection of fourteen papers. The papers report on the 
state of the art work on different aspects of information structure. The 
papers vary greatly as far as the significance of their contribution and 
clarity of presentation are concerned. The first eight papers are 
theoretical in nature, while the last six report on empirical data from 
production and perception experiments. The majority of the papers 
analyse information structural phenomena in German, but some other 
languages also receive coverage: Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Russian, 
Vedic. Both word-order related phenomena and prosodic phenomena 
are examined. The majority of the papers were contributed by the 
members of the Research Group "Linguistic Foundations of Cognitive 
Science: Linguistic and Conceptual Knowledge" at the University of 
Leipzig, but papers were also invited from researchers in the field 
elsewhere (Prague, Potsdam, Budapest). 

In the following section we are going to give a brief summary of each 
of the fourteen papers in the order they appeared in the book. Finally, 
we are going to present a short evaluation of the book as a whole.

SYNOPSIS

"Degrees of Contrast and the Topic-Focus Articulation" by Eva 
Hajicová and Petr Sgall studies the phenomenon of contrast and 
degrees of its intensity as determined by the type of contrast. 
However, it is left unspecified what the authors mean precisely 
by 'intensity': whether we are speaking about some prosodic metrics or 
somebody's perception. It is more likely to be the latter, since the 
authors use the words 'contrast is felt even stronger', but it still 
remains unclear whether the decisions are based on the authors' 
personal intuitions or on the results of some perception study. 

The study is set in the Praguian Functional Generative Description 
(FGD) framework, which includes a description of the topic-focus 
articulation (TFA). The first part of the paper deals with TFA. The 
authors define it as a relation of 'aboutness' where focus holds about 
its topic. The authors also include a section about annotating Prague 
Dependency Treebank with TFA. However, no further clarification is 
given how this goal is achieved with the rather vague definition of TFA.

The rest of the paper discusses contrast in TFA. The means of 
expressing contrast in Czech include strong pronominal forms and 
rising stress; the latter, however, is also exploited towards other ends 
(e.g. 'open continuation'). Focus has been viewed as a choice from a 
set of alternatives (Rooth 1985), and as such always be contrastive. 
German linguists often distinguish between contrastive and non-
contrastive focus, though. The authors of the present paper propose 
that there are two degrees of contrast present in the focus in German, 
signalled by the structure of the language. In Czech the contrast in 
focus does not vary in its intensity. This is not the case with contrast in 
topic, or more precisely on context bound (CB) items, however. The 
authors suggest that the intensity of contrast on a CB item depends on 
how narrow the focus is, whether the set of alternatives is explicitly 
mentioned or implicit, and the range of the set of alternatives. 

In "Information Structure and Modular Grammar", Anita Steube, Kai 
Alter and Andreas Späth present a model of grammar set in the 
generative framework, that consists of Lexicon, Semantic Form, S-
Structure, and Phonological Form, in which information structure is 
realised at each level of grammar. They view information structure as 
a pragmatic phenomenon, which is part of the cognitive model. The 
pre-structuring of information takes place before entering into the 
grammar model. The lexicon serves as the interface between the 
conceptual system and the grammar. When the concepts are mapped 
onto lexical items their representations are enriched with information 
structural features.

The authors mostly discuss information structure in terms of 
background and focus, although they also define topic and comment. 
The default organisation of information in German is that background 
elements precede focus elements. The focus domain starts to the right 
of the attitudinal adverbials. However, focus domain and focus of a 
sentence are not identical: constituents base-generated in the focus 
domain can move out of the domain. There are two kinds of 
movement: information structure motivated and purely syntactically 
motivated movement. If the syntactically motivated movement takes 
focus constituents out of the focus domain, they need to be explicitly 
marked by the focus feature [+F] in the S-Structure, which later gets 
realised in prosody. Similarly, the background elements remaining in 
the focus domain need to be marked by [-F]. When the S-Structure is 
mapped on Phonological Form the constituents marked with [-F] are 
de-accented, and the ones with [+F] are accented. In what follows the 
authors use their model to analyse German categoric and correction 
sentences, and sentences with the Bridge Contour.

The paper discusses important aspects of German information 
structure. However, it would have profited immensely by having an 
introduction which would provide the reader with guidance through the 
paper, and a conclusion summarising the points the authors 
themselves consider most important. Without these important 
components the paper feels unfocussed.

"Negative Descriptions of Events: Semantic and Conceptual Aspects of 
Sentence Negation and its Relevance for Information Structure" by 
Andreas Späth and Martin Trautwein discusses the relation between 
the scope of negation and the information structure of a sentence. In 
the surface form of a sentence, negation has the striking role of 
dividing the individual information units of the sentence and marking 
their function. Only the part on the right of the negation (i.e. focus) is 
subject to truth-conditional evaluation, the part of the sentence that 
precedes the negation is presupposed. Hence a determiner phrase's 
(DP) position before the negation in the sentence makes it 
presuppositional. This helps to explain why Slavic languages do not 
need a definite article, which is generally viewed as the source of 
presupposition, to mark their DPs as specific. 

The authors argue that due to the negation's fixed position before the 
focus of the sentence, external negation as used in Propositional 
Logic is not appropriate for describing the truth conditions of natural 
languages. Moreover we can only speak of the truth of an event in a 
specific spatio-temporal domain. The authors examine three 
approaches to logically representing negative events: negative event 
quantification (~Ee[e INST p]), negative instantiation (Ee[~(e INST p)]) 
and negative propositional condition (Ee[e INST ~p]). Even though the 
latter performs best of the above three as an approximation to reality, 
it is still not adequate since it does not take into account the semantic 
and syntactic constraints on sentence structure. In the section 
following this discussion the authors show how syntax determines the 
way the semantics of negative sentences is composed.

Beáta Gyuris' "Two Types of Contrastive Topics?" starts with a 
hypothesis that there are two kinds of contrastive topic DPs in 
Hungarian: the ones that are only licensed by the very same DP in the 
previous discourse and the ones that can also be licensed by other 
DPs. The author presents a number of Hungarian question-answer 
pairs that seem to reflect this tendency. Moreover, this tendency 
seems to be related to the monotonicity of the DPs: the DPs with 
monotone increasing determiners seem to be able to be used in a 
much wider range of contexts than the ones with monotone 
decreasing and non-monotonic determiners. 

At first the author analyses the data in the framework proposed by 
Büring (1997). It turns out that his mechanism cannot account for all 
the Hungarian examples of syntactically possible, but uninterpretable 
sentences with contrastive topic DPs. In what follows, the author 
resorts to Kadmon's (2001) theory on discourse congruence to explain 
why certain sentences with contrastive topic DPs cannot be used as 
answers to certain questions. Kadmon proposed a restriction that the 
topic value of the answer declarative sentence with a contrastive topic 
corresponds to the focus value of the last question under discussion 
(QUD). Gyuris supplements Kadmon's restriction with two more 
restrictions: i) in order for a declarative sentence with a contrastive 
topic to be accepted as an appropriate answer to a question, this overt 
question and the last QUD have to be sub-questions of the 
same 'superquestion', and ii) in case the overt question and the last 
QUD are not identical, the answer declarative must not entail a 
complete answer to the overt question. The paper rejects the initial 
hypothesis about the twofold division of DPs in Hungarian, and 
proposes that the the data presented can be accounted for by the 
above three restrictions.
 
In "Information Structure -- Two-dimensionally Explicated" the author, 
Ingolf Max, presents a two-dimensional representation for sentence 
semantics. The first meaning dimension represents the proper 
ordinary meaning of the sentence, which is given by the matrix of the 
sentence semantic form (SF) in first order logic. The second meaning 
dimension relates to the information structure of the sentence: it 
represents the logical form of the background of the sentence, 
according to background/focus partitioning. In the case of categorical 
sentences, the second dimension is a sub-conjunction of the 
conjunction in the proper SF of the sentence on the first dimension. In 
thetic sentences any tautology can serve as the background.

Max introduces a new kind of presupposition-preserving negation (~^) 
in the form of a special reduction operator that works on both 
dimensions. Using this negation and the relations of 'necessitation' 
and 'entailment' the author can define important semantic notions 
of 'presupposition' and 'assertion'.

Using his two-dimensional representation, Max models various 
linguistic phenomena: categorical sentences, thetic sentences, 
generalization, hat contour and correction sentences. In his approach 
the scope inversion accompanying the hat contour can be modelled in 
a straightforward manner: inverting the direct order of AE and ~^ is all 
that is needed.

In "Topic Constraints in the German Middlefield" Brigitta Haftka takes a 
close look at the word order in the middlefield of German categorical 
sentences. This is the position for contextually known information. 
Haftka distinguishes two kinds of topics: 'proper topic'/'aboutness 
topic'/'theme' on the one hand and 'anaphoric topics' on the 
other. 'Proper topic' is what the rest of the sentence is predicated 
about. Anaphoric topics are known background elements that are 
stored in the narrow short-term memory of the speaker. Proper topic is 
moved to the top of the sentence, while anaphoric topics fill the so-
called Wackernagel position, which follows the proper topic and 
precedes the sentence adverbial position.

The study shows that the order of anaphoric topics in Wackernagel 
position is highly grammaticalised. Haftka formulates seven constraints 
that model how the word order is determined in the topicality 
middlefield. The main body of the paper is followed by an appendix 
where the author presents an optimality theoretic ranking scheme for 
the above constraints.

"Contrastive Word Stress in Vedic Endo- and Exocentric compounds" 
by Rosemarie Lühr is an extensive study of stress patterns in different 
classes of Vedic compounds. The basic stressing rules previously 
proposed for Vedic compounds leave a lot of counter-examples 
unexplained. Lühr shows that stress shifts in Vedic compounds are 
brought along by the need to mark contrast i) between 'substantive' 
and 'adjective' parts of speech ii) compound internally between the 
parts of speech of a constituent of the compound and the compound 
as a whole. The author uses optimality theoretic approach to explain 
the stress shifts.

The paper would have benefited immensely if instead of overwhelming 
the reader with a multitude of examples, the author would have used 
more of the space for explanatory purposes. Several central notions 
lack a clear definition, e.g. 'bahuvrihis', which refers to a type of Vedic 
compound. 

In "Towards a Scalar Notion of Information Structural Markedness" 
Thomas Weskott proposes to view information structural (IS) 
markedness in the light of contextual requirement. The more 
requirements a given IS-variant of a sentence has to the context it is 
being uttered in, the more marked it is. The author makes three 
assumptions that serve to make decisions about information structural 
complexity of sentences: i) the basic word order in German sentences 
is SVO, ii) the default phrasal stress falls on the most deeply 
embedded constituent, and iii) the complexity of an IS-variant depends 
on the two dimensions of information structural bracketing: Topic-
Comment-Structure (TCS) and Focus-Background-Structure (FBS). 
The last assumption implies that the bigger the overlap is between 
topic and background on the one hand, and between comment and 
focus on the other hand, the less complex the information structure of 
the given sentence is. Violation of any of the three assumptions adds 
to the complexity of the IS of the given sentence.

Thetic sentences are the least complex sentences from the IS point of 
view, since they place no restrictions to their context, and can be 
uttered 'out-of-the-blue'. Categorical sentences have varying degrees 
of complexity depending on how many of the above assumptions they 
violate.

1a) [Der Kellner]T/B [beleidigte den GAST]C/F.
1b) [Den GAST]T/F [beleidigte der Kellner]C/B.
(T(opic), C(omment), B(ackground), F(ocus))

According to Weskott's theory the above two sentences represent the 
two opposite ends of the spectrum of information structural 
markedness: while the first sentence (1a) follows all the assumptions, 
the second one (1b) violates all three of them. Hence, the information 
structure of the second sentence is maximally complex. Weskott shows 
that his approach about the scale of IS markedness and its relation to 
the utterance context fits in nicely with empirical data about sentence 
processing difficulties.

"Prosody in Dialogues and Single Sentences: How Prosody Can 
Influence Speech Perception" by Claudia Hruska and Kai Alter studies 
the role of intonational focus. They describe three different perception 
experiments. The audio data used represented three different focus 
conditions: neutral focus (2a), broad focus (2b), and narrow focus 
(2c). Neutral focus requires no preceding context, and is purely 
syntactically determined, while both broad and narrow focus need to 
be embedded in context. This context was provided by preceding the 
sentence containing the given focus type by an appropriate question.

2a) [Peter vershpricht Anna zu arbeiten](IPh) und das Büro zu putzen.
2b) 
Q: Was verspricht Peter Anna zu tun?
A: Peter vershpricht Anna zu (ARBEITEN und das BÜRO zu putzen)
(F).

2c)
Q: Wem verspricht Peter zu arbeiten und das Büro zu putzen?
A: Peter vershpricht (ANNA)(F) zu arbeiten und das Büro zu putzen.

The first perception experiment explored the role of intonational focus 
in dialogues, which in the present case consisted of question-answer 
(QA) pairs. In addition to appropriate QA pairs, other pairs were 
constructed where the focus in the answer did not match the question. 
In the second and third perception experiment the subjects were 
presented with single sentences that were either neutrally focussed or 
contained a broad or a narrow focus.

Besides the judgment of the subjects about the appropriatenesss of 
the sentences, electroencephalogram (EEG) was continuously 
recorded, and event-related brain potentials were measured. In the 
dialogues' experiment the subjects were very good at differentiating 
between the matching and non-matching question-answer pairs 
(98%) . The ERP data showed that inappropriate intonation impairs 
comprehension. De-accentuation of new information causes bigger 
problems than having superfluous accents in the sentence. The ERP 
recordings showed that listeners concentrate their attention at the 
sentence positions where new information is expected. In the single 
sentence experiments neutral focus was preferred. The acceptance 
rate for sentences with narrow focus was especially low (8%).

"On the Independence of Information Structural Processing from 
Prosody" by Ulrike Toepel and Kai Alter continues in the same vein as 
the previous paper in the book. This time the perceptual studies are 
about whether the subjects are able to distinguish between a narrow 
new focus accent and a contrastive focus accent in German 
sentences. The authors carry out two perception experiments. They 
use the same data in both experiments: 44 three sentence dialogues 
where the third sentence is the critical one. Besides the appropriate 
focus accent in appropriate context they create two inappropriate 
conditions, changing the focus of the third sentence so that a 
contrastive accent appears in a new focus context and a new focus 
accent appears in a contrastive context. The only difference between 
the experiments was that in the first experiment the subjects were 
asked a content question based on each dialogue, while in the second 
experiment they had to explicitly pay attention to the prosody of the 
dialogues and assess its appropriateness. During the experiments the 
electroencephalogram (EEG) was continuously recorded.

Based on ERP (event-related brain potential) data, the authors 
conclude that subjects are sensitive to the subtle differences that the 
new and the contrastive focus accent exhibit. Similarly to the previous 
paper, the authors found that over-specification of prosodic 
information (a contrastive focus accent in a new focus context) can be 
dealt with without bigger problems, while prosodic under-specification 
(a new focus accent in a contrastive focus context) causes processing 
difficulties.

"The Prosodic Pattern of Contrastive Accent in Russian" by Grit 
Mehlhorn describes the results from a production experiment and 
three perception experiments that aimed at establishing whether 
contrastive focus accent represented a different category from the 
new focus accent in Russian.

In the production experiment the subjects had to read experimental 
sentences set in appropriate context. The collected data revealed that 
contrastive focus accents were characterised by a higher pitch than 
the new focus accents. The length of the syllable carrying the main 
accent was considerably increased in the case of the contrastive focus 
accent. In contrast to sentences with a new focus accent, the ones 
with a contrastive accent have strongly centred contours.

In the three perception experiments the subjects were asked to 
determine the position of the accent, characterise the prominence of 
the accent on a five-grade scale, and to characterise the pattern of the 
perceived accent in terms of rises and falls. The results showed that 
the subjects found it easier to correctly determine the location of 
contrastive focus accents (98.8%) than new focus accents (54.6%). 
The average grade of prominence the subjects assigned to contrastive 
accents (4.42) was considerably higher than that assigned to new 
focus accents (2.24). Even though there was not perfect agreement 
among the subjects about the exact pattern of neither new focus nor 
contrastive accents in Russian, they systematically assigned a 
different pattern to contrastive accents as opposed to new focus 
accents. The author concludes that the experimental data proves that 
contrastive and new focus accents represent different categories in 
Russian.

In "Focus Structure and the Processing of Word Order Variations in 
German", the authors, Britta Stolterfoht and Markus Bader study the 
focus structural effects in processing German sentences with 
scrambled word order. The basic assumption is that in order for focus 
to project (i.e. produce wide focus reading) the constituent carrying 
the nuclear accent has to be in its base position and in the sister 
position of the verbal head (Haider & Rosengren 2002). If the nuclear 
accent falls on a moved constituent, only narrow focus reading is 
possible.

The preferred word order in German is subject before object (SO). 
However, it is possible to scramble the object before the subject (OS). 
Sometimes the syntactic function of the DPs can be locally or globally 
ambiguous. The sentences in Examples 3a and 3b are ambiguous in 
respect to their word order until the reader reads the finite verb. Then 
the number information (singular or plural) of the verb disambiguates 
the syntactic functions of the preceding DPs. 

3a) Maria hat behauptet, dass [die Tante die Nichten begrüßt hat](F).
3b) Maria hat behauptet, dass die Tante(i) [die Nichten](F) t(i) begrüßt 
haben.

According to the above assumption, at this point the reader, besides 
performing a syntactic re-analysis, should also perform a focus 
structural revision. The authors test this hypothesis in two reading 
experiments. They measure the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) 
of the subjects. The experimental data supports the hypothesis, since 
in the case of scrambled sentences, an additional negative ERP effect 
was observed. The authors interpret this as the result of focus 
structural revision.

"Intonational Patterns in Contrast and Concession" by Carla Umbach, 
Ina Mleinek, Christine Lehmann, Thomas Weskott, Kai Alter, Anita 
Steube describes an experiment that was conducted to verify Lang's 
(2001) hypothesis that in German the contrastive and the concessive 
readings of but/aber-sentences are reflected in their distinct prosody.

The experiment was a speech production task where the subjects had 
to read but/aber-sentences in their respective contrastive and 
concessive contexts. The phonological analysis of results did not 
reveal any systematic difference in the F0-contours of the two 
readings. A further statistical analysis was performed to uncover any 
hidden tendencies, but it also failed to reveal a systematic difference 
between the two readings.

The authors admit that there is a big inter- and intra-subject variation 
in the data, that does not allow them to provide a proof to Lang's 
hypothesis. However, at the same time they avoid disproving the 
hypothesis, saying that other uncontrolled factors may have been 
present during the experiment. They also pronounce the possibility 
that the distinction in intonational patterns proposed by Lang could still 
emerge in the case of a larger sample size of subjects.

In "Prosody in Contrast. Prosodic Distinction of Contrast and 
Correction Readings of Polish Adversative Coordinate Structures" 
Dorothee Fehrmann examines the prosody of Polish adversative 
coordinate structures, where the first conjunct contains a negative 
marker (see Example 4).

4) 
Piotr nie   ma  samochodu, ale  motocykl. 
Peter S-Neg has car        Conj motorbike

Depending on the context the sentence appears in, such coordinate 
structures can be interpreted as contrast or correction. Fehrmann 
investigates the question of whether these two readings are 
distinguished by their prosody in Polish. In order to do that she 
conducted a production experiment, where subjects had to read 
lexically and syntactically identical adversative coordinate 
constructions embedded in context to give them either a contrast or 
correction reading.

The resulting intonation contours exhibited a lot of variability, and 
therefore Fehrmann concludes that it is not obligatory in Polish to 
differentiate between contrast or correction readings of adversative 
structures by prosodic means. However, she does identify a frequent 
intonation contour, that she calls 'the default-IC', with which correction 
constructions are correlated more often than contrast constructions. 
The default-IC is a single intonational phrase that covers the whole 
coordinate construction. In the case of contrast it is more likely that 
there is a sentence internal intonational boundary between the two 
conjuncts. The author concludes that rather than being determined by 
the conceptual interpretation type, the intonational patterns of 
adversative coordinate constructions depend on the particular 
information structure of the conjuncts.

EVALUATION

The book is a diverse body of papers, all of which study some aspect 
of information structure. The papers vary greatly as far as the 
significance of their contribution and clarity of presentation are 
concerned. As a downside, they exhibit the same vagueness of 
definition so characteristic of the field of information structure, while 
basing the theory mostly on syntactically simple and short examples. 
Some of the papers suffer from structural deficits, such as the lack of 
introduction and conclusion. In other papers central terminology is 
used without providing a clear definition. 

There are also some minor editorial issues, which nevertheless can 
cause confusion. Besides some typos, in the first paper there are 
some formatting problems where example text gets mixed up with the 
text of the main body of the paper (page 10), and on pages 154 and 
155 seven lines of text are printed twice.

All in all, several interesting ideas concerning information structure are 
put forward in the collection. The book does a great service to the 
heterogeneous field of information structure already merely by 
bringing together between the same covers a body of papers from a 
number of researchers in the field. This is hopefully a step forward 
towards a more unified treatment of information structure over different 
languages and schools of thought. 

REFERENCES

Büring, D. (1997): The Meaning of Topic and Focus. The 59th Street 
Bridge Accent. London, New York: Routlege.

Haider, H. and I. Rosengren (2002): Scrambling -- Non-triggered 
Chain Formation in OV-languages. MS. Salzburg University and Lund 
University.

Kadmon, N. (2001): Formal Pragmatics. Malden, MA, Oxford: 
Blackwell.

Lang, E. (2001): Kontrastiv vs. implikativ: Interpretationseffekte 
intonatorischer Distinktionen bei Koordination. In: A. Steube and C. 
Umbach (eds), 113-138.

Rooth, M. (1985): Association with focus. PhD dissertation. University 
of Massachusetts, Amherst. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER	

Maarika Traat is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, UK. 
She is working under the supervision of Mark Steedman and Johan 
Bos. Her doctoral study focuses on developing a semantic 
representation with information structure compatible with first order 
logic, and embedding this semantics in a categorial grammar 
formalism. Her other current research interests are the syntax and 
semantics of English cleft constructions, and calculating 
presuppositions.





-----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-16-1738