Typology of Information Structure: The Viewpoint of Language Production
Stavros Skopeteas
Languages differ not only with respect to the means of encoding information structure,
but also in the choice of particular information structures that native speakers make in
certain contexts. The Questionnaire on Information Structure1 is a collection of 29
production experiments that simulate different discourse conditions in a near-naturalistic
manner, in order to allow for cross-linguistic comparison with respect to the choice of
information structure in certain contexts. Data from the following languages have been
elicited by means of these experiments: Amer. English, Can. French, Chinese, Dutch,
Georgian, Greek, Hungarian, Japanese, Konkani, Mawng, Niue, Prinmi, Teribe, and
Yucatec Maya. The first part of my talk is devoted to the presentation of this tool for
linguistic fieldwork and discusses the methodological issues concerning the data gathered
through production experiments.
In the second part of my talk, I will present the typological generalizations that are
possible through this kind of linguistic evidence.2 In particular, I will compare the data
sets gathered through two different experiments in the following languages: Amer.
English, Greek, Georgian, and Yucatec Maya:
- The first experiment manipulates the givenness of agents and patients through the
description of picture sequences. The discourse condition “given patient and new
agent” induces passives in English and Yucatec Maya, however not in Greek and
Georgian although passive voice is available in both grammars. In Georgian, this
condition induces object-first word orders instead, while the information
structural reflexes on Greek are limited to the choice of a different prosodic
structure.
- The second experiment elicits spontaneous answers to several question types.
English and Yucatec Maya speakers have used cleft sentences in order to answer
questions that induce exhaustive answers while Greek and Georgian speakers did
not (though the grammars of both languages provide for cleft constructions). In
Georgian, certain question types had a strong impact on word order choice, while
in Greek the dominant strategy was again the prosodic one.
These observations allow for generalizations concerning the typological profile of the
object languages; from a comparative perspective, they shed light on the long discussed
issue of the functional complementarity of prosody and syntax with respect to the
encoding of information structure. In order to account for the differences in the language
specific data patterns, I will sketch a formal architecture in terms of constraint
interactions which predict the choices speakers make in the individual languages.
1
The development of the Questionnaire on Information Structure as well as the creation of the typological
data set is the product of a collaborative research made by the project Typology of Information Structure,
which is part of the research center on Information Structure (University of Potsdam and Humboldt
University Berlin). Members of the project are Gisbert Fanselow, Caroline Féry, Manfred Krifka, Sam
Hellmuth, Ines Fiedler, Anne Schwarz, and Stavros Skopeteas.
2
This part of the talk contains joint work with Sam Hellmuth (on constraint interaction), Elisabeth
Verhoeven (on Yucatec Maya syntax), Frank Kügler (on Yucatec Maya prosody), Gisbert Fanselow,
Caroline Féry (on Georgian word order).