Corpus-Meeting
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Nov 13/14, 2009
Augustin Speyer
The assignnment of information structural categories in ‚Topicalization and Clash
Avidance’
Main focus: Reconstruction of sentence prosody in Old- and Middle English
Method: identification of information structural properties and abduction of the prosody
possible, because:
- if alignment of information structure to prosody follows similar rules in Modern English and German
 alignment of IS to prosody followed similar rules in Proto-West-Germanic
 alignment of IS to prosody followed similar rules in all stages between PWGerm and ModE/G
Categories:
- newness/oldness
- contrast
- topichood
Working definition of newness/oldness:
A referential expression R counts as old if there is a coreferent expression R’ used formerly in the same
subsection of the text in which R appears.
Subsection: Either defined by textual markers (chapters/paragraphs) or, if not possible, defined as a space of 20
sentences (since the likelihood that a referent is regarded as salient if it has not been used for at least 20
sentences is rather low)
Working definition of contrast (following Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998; Prince 1999):
R is in contrast to R’ if
- R and R’ belong to the same textually evoked set M
- both are equally salient (that is: stand in adjacent sentences)
(contrast was assigned by default also to quantified phrases)
Working definition of topic:
- R is a topic if it is what the sentence is about (Reinhart 1981)
- In cases of doubt topic continuity is assumed (borrowed from Centering Theory, s. Grosz et al. 1995)
Technical implementation: done by hand (couldn’t be automated for full NPs; there were not that many
sentences anyway)
the proper way: adding labels (manually) to output files of CorpusSearch and use those labels for coding query
References:
Grosz, Barbara J., Aravind K. Joshi & Scott Weinstein (1995): Centering: A Framework for modelling the local
coherence of discourse. Computational Linguistics 21, 203-225.
Prince, Ellen F. (1999): How Not to Mark Topics: ‘Topicalization’ in English and Yiddish. In: Texas Linguistics
Forum, chapter 8. Austin: University of Texas
Reinhart, Tanya (1981): Pragmatics and linguistics: an analysis of sentence topics. Philosophica 27, 53–94.
Speyer, Augustin (2008): Topicalization and Clash Avoidance. PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania (to
appear 2010 at Mouton de Gruyter, TiEL series)
Vallduví, Enric & Maria Vilkuna (1998) On rheme and kontrast. In: P. Culicover and L. McNally (eds.): Syntax
and Semantics 29: The limits of syntax. New York: Academic Press, 79–108.