Zimmermann Malte, Féry Caroline (Editors). Information Structure: Theoretical, Typological, and Experimental Perspectives (Oxford Linguistics)

Oxford University Press. 2009. — 412 p. — ISBN: 0199570957.In this book leading scholars provide state-of-the-art overviews of approaches to the formal expression of information structure in natural language and its interaction with general principles of human cognition and communication. They present critical accounts of current understanding of how aspects of grammar, such as prosody, syntax, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics, interact in the packing and unpacking of information in communication.They also look at the psycholinguistics behind the production and perception of information-structural categories. The book reflects the advances in recent research on all central aspects of the subject, including concepts of focus versus background, topic versus comment, and given versus new, and the kinds of inferences required to make sense of different combinations of words, syntax, intonation, and context. The chapters include typological and diachronic perspectives on information structure. Taken as a whole the book demonstrates the productive value of combining.Topic and Focus
Second occurrence focus and Relativized Stress F
How focus and givenness shape prosody
Structural focus and exhaustivity
The interpretation of topical indefinites as direct and indirect aboutness topics
Contrastive topics operate on speech acts
Biased questions, intonation, and discourse
Cross-Linguistic Variation and Diachronic Change
Towards a typology of focus realization
Focus in Aghem
Subject focus in West African languages
Information st r uc ture and OV order
Information st r uc ture and unmarked word order in (Older) Ger manic
Exper imental and Psycholinguistic Approaches
Effects of givenness and constraints on free word order
Investigating effects of structural and information-structural factors on pronoun resolution
Given and new infor mation in spatial statements