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This paper discusses a phenomenon that has so far received little attention in previous literature: the presence, in several languages from different branches of the Austronesian family, of polyfunctional markers, which combine an aspectual meaning of change of state with information and discourse structuring functions. In this study, based on a comparative analysis of fifty-two Austronesian languages, I show that polyfunctional change of state markers are distributed throughout the entire family, crosscutting the major typological and geographical divide between Western and Eastern Austronesian. I argue that the development of information and discourse structuring functions of change of state markers derives from applying the notions of current relevance and transition to new situation not to eventualities, but to elements of propositions, and I also suggest that this process may be universally valid and could explain the similar development of change of state markers into information and discourse structuring devices attested in non-Austronesian languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the C-ORAL-ESQ corpus project, which is dedicated to the study of the speech of individuals with schizophrenia. The main aim of the project is to investigate cognitive aspects of individuals with schizophrenia. This investigation is carried through the compilation of a spontaneous speech corpus and its study, which focuses mainly on the analysis of information structuring and its prosodic correlates. The paper mainly deals with the methodological aspects of the corpus compilation and reports its present stage: it informs about the environment and the setting of the sound file recordings, the medical and ethical criteria for the selection of the participants, the corpus aimed dimensions and the present stage of compilation, as well as its design and compilation criteria, which include attention to prosodic annotation, and metadata related to the participants' characteristics. Additionally, the theory adopted for the study of information structure is summarized, focusing on those aspects that can better address cognitive processes of individuals with schizophrenia and their prosodic correlates. Finally, the perspectives for future studies and resource compilations are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the synchronization of manual gestures with prosody and information structure using Turkish natural speech data. Prosody has long been linked to gesture as a key driver of gesture–speech synchronization. Gesture has a hierarchical phrasal structure similar to prosody. At the lowest level, gesture has been shown to be synchronized with prosody (e.g., apexes and pitch accents). However, less is known about higher levels. Even less is known about timing relationships with information structure, though this is signaled by prosody and linked to gesture. The present study analyzed phrase synchronization in 3 hr of narrations in Turkish annotated for gesture, prosody, and information structure—topics and foci. The analysis of 515 gesture phrases showed that there was no one-to-one synchronization with intermediate phrases, but their onsets and offsets were synchronized. Moreover, information structural units, topics, and foci were closely synchronized with gesture phrase medial stroke + post-hold combinations (i.e., apical areas). In addition, iconic and metaphoric gestures were more likely to be paired with foci, and deictics with topics. Overall, the results confirm synchronization of gesture and prosody at the phrasal level and provide evidence that gesture shows a direct sensitivity to information structure. These show that speech and gesture production are more connected than assumed in existing production models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantitative studies of V2 in Medieval French have produced diverging results with respect to the rate of use of V2 and the informational value of the initial XP. These divergences are hypothesized to relate to the register of investigated texts. The hypothesis is verified by the systematic analysis of unambiguous V2 (with an expressed post-verbal subject) with respect to rates of use and informational value of XPs in three register-differentiated Anglo-Norman prose legal texts from the 1260–1300 period. On rates, unambiguous V2 is three times more frequent in the most formal, legal treatise text than it is in the less formal, court dialogues. On informational value, indications are provided that the XP tends to have a Focus value more often in more formal texts. Register thus impacts the behavior of unambiguous V2 configurations in Medieval French; using data less remote from the primary competence of speakers helps in approaching the effective curve of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One characteristic of multilingual speakers is that in everyday life, they may integrate elements from their languages in the same sentence or discourse, a practice known as code-switching. This paper examines code-switching at the interfaces, in particular as related to information structure. Despite the fact that a core question of modern linguistic theory is how syntactic and information-structural theories interact in accounting for licensing of different grammatical phenomena, there has been relatively little literature on code-switching and information structure. In this paper, we provide an overview of the available literature on code-switching across different language combinations, focusing in particular on subject pronoun–verb switches, ellipsis, light verbs, topic/focus particles, and code-switching between sign languages. We argue that the study of the interplay between information structure and code-switching sheds light on our understanding of multilingual grammars and language competence more generally. In this regard, we discuss theoretical and methodological considerations to guide future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is evidence from both behavior and brain activity that the way information is structured, through the use of focus, can up-regulate processing of focused constituents, likely to give prominence to the relevant aspects of the input. This is hypothesized to be universal, regardless of the different ways in which languages encode focus. In order to test this universalist hypothesis, we need to go beyond the more familiar linguistic strategies for marking focus, such as by means of intonation or specific syntactic structures (e.g., it-clefts). Therefore, in this study, we examine Makhuwa-Enahara, a Bantu language spoken in northern Mozambique, which uniquely marks focus through verbal conjugation. The participants were presented with sentences that consisted of either a semantically anomalous constituent or a semantically nonanomalous constituent. Moreover, focus on this particular constituent could be either present or absent. We observed a consistent pattern: Focused information generated a more negative N400 response than the same information in nonfocus position. This demonstrates that regardless of how focus is marked, its consequence seems to result in an upregulation of processing of information that is in focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intonation is an instrument for structuring discourse and emphasizing different types of information. In German, for example, pitch is used to highlight focus, while in Vietnamese, different pitch contours distinguish lexical tones. As of yet, the interplay between intonation and lexical tone in relation to information structure has not been sufficiently investigated across languages. Vietnamese has six lexical tones and is particularly interesting for investigating the influence of different intonation strategies on the realization of tones. Here, we present a production study with 70 Northern Vietnamese speakers. The participants read six sentences under two conditions. In each sentence, a word occurring in the final position of the sentence and carrying one of the six tones was pronounced in two different discourse contexts. Acoustic analyses of the intonation contours showed that Vietnamese speakers realized the words with significant differences in pitch at the onset. Yet, the strategies for raising or lowering the pitch varied depending on the tone. Our results show the use of prosodic cues in a complex tone system across a large number of speakers. In addition, the study can serve as a starting point for educational programs that include training on intonation patterns in specific contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the grammar of Tuxtla Totonac (TTu), constituent order is not used to codify syntactic relations like Subject or Object. Our analysis shows that the order of constituents in the clause in TTu is rigidly governed by the thematic relations in the communicative structure of sentences. For all configurations of S, V, O, Rheme (the portion of the clause corresponding to what the speaker wants their interlocutor to know) always precedes Theme (the portion of the clause that expresses what the clause is about). The analysis also shows that in the construction of discourse, each of the four nominal positions of the TTu sentence template serves a different communicative purpose. The results show that it is methodologically fruitful to separate the study of information structure at the level of the clause (Rheme/Theme) from the structuring of information at the level of discourse (Topic). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study revisits a contested textual variant concerning the presence, placement, and person of an imperative directed at wives in Eph. 5.22. Most previous treatments of this variant have decided the matter (typically in favor of the reading without an imperative) on the basis of manuscript support and transcriptional arguments about how readers and copyists of the text would have changed it, but the intrinsic probabilities of what the author would have written based on his argument and style have generally been neglected. This study fills this gap by assessing the intrinsic probabilities of the variant readings in Eph. 5.22 using discourse and information structure, the pragmatics of the Greek imperative, and stylistic observations in Ephesians. As a result of this analysis, the reading with the highest intrinsic probability is shown to be τοῖς ἰδίοις ἀνδράσιν ὑποτασσέσθωσαν, which bolsters the recent case made by Gurry (2021) for the same reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple research directions have been proposed to study the information structure of Reddit. One of them is to model inter-subreddit relations but modeling user interactions in the form of a graph. Building upon prior work centered on political subreddits using pre-2020 data, we expand this investigation to include a more extensive dataset spanning 2022 and encompassing diverse topic areas. Employing NLP techniques such as text embeddings, we model subreddit content directly and construct a subreddit graph network based on cosine similarity. Community detection using the Louvain method reveals distinct subreddits and allows the analysis of inter-community connections via previous works' concepts of "bridges" and "gateways". Surprisingly, our findings indicate redundancy between bridges and gateways in the utilized dataset. Therefore, we introduce a new concept, "highways". Highways, representing the most traversed paths between subreddits, unveil insights not captured by previous analyses, underscoring the significance of novel conceptual frameworks in uncovering latent knowledge within Reddit's online community structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emphasis is a ubiquitous notion in classical scholarship, but its vagueness has repeatedly been criticized (and its usefulness, consequently, questioned) by Greek linguists. This brief study seeks to identify (and secure) a place for this notion in the analytical toolbox for the description of Classical Greek by applying the strict but nuanced definition of emphasis in Functional Discourse Grammar (Hengeveld and Mackenzie 2008) to the identification and classification of linguistic devices in the ancient language. In particular, this study argues for a distinction between emphasis as a rhetorical effect and emphasis as a communicative intention. In the former understanding, emphasis may be produced secondarily by a number of linguistic and rhetorical devices. Conversely, linguistic emphasis stricto sensu would only be conveyed by linguistic devices used primarily to intensify linguistic entities of any level (discourse acts, propositional contents, subacts). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study stochastic exchangeable games among a finite number of teams consisting of a large but finite number of decision makers as well as their mean-field limit with infinite number of decision makers in each team. For this class of games within static and dynamic settings, we introduce sets of randomized policies under various decentralized information structures with privately independent or common randomness for decision makers within each team. (i) For a general class of exchangeable stochastic games with a finite number of decision makers, we first establish the existence of a Nash equilibrium under randomized policies (with common randomness) within each team that are exchangeable (but not necessarily symmetric, i.e., identical) among decision makers within each team. (ii) As the number of decision makers within each team goes to infinity (that is, for the mean-field limit game among teams), we show that a Nash equilibrium exists under randomized policies within each team that are independently randomized and symmetric among decision makers within each team (that is, there is no common randomness). (iii) Finally, we establish that a Nash equilibrium for a class of mean-field games among teams under independently randomized symmetric policies constitutes an approximate Nash equilibrium for the corresponding prelimit (exchangeable) game among teams with finite but large numbers of decision makers. (iv) We thus establish a rigorous connection between agent-based-modeling and team-against-team games, via the representative agents defining the game played in equilibrium, and we furthermore show that common randomness is not necessary for large team-against-team games, unlike the case with small-sized ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the information structural properties of so-called premise (also factual) conditionals, conditional sentences whose antecedent repeats previously evoked content. We argue that, semantically, premise conditionals are hypothetical conditionals, with two pragmatic properties: their antecedent is echoic and thematic. We show that some of the differences identified in the literature between hypothetical and premise conditionals follow from the informational status of the antecedent. While the antecedent of a premise conditional is thematic, the antecedent of a hypothetical conditional can also be rhematic. Rhematic conditionals happen to be compatible with all the characteristics that stand out as incompatible with premise conditionals. Additionally, we argue that echoicity is a definitional property of the premise reading of indicative conditionals. • Premise (also called factual) conditionals are not a syntactic/semantic object on their own. • They are just a possible interpretation of an indicative conditional given the right discourse conditions. • We define them as thematic and echoic; the antecedent need not be Common Ground. • Thematicity explains previously observed characteristics of premise conditionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Secretary (16742354) is the property of Secretary Editorial Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Indexing P arguments on bivalent predicates is often considered more restricted and less often obligatory than A indexing. However, differential A indexing, i.e., the absence versus the presence of an index referring to the A argument role, is not uncommon either: usually present A indexes can be omitted in particular discourse settings. However, differential A indexing has been a Cinderella subject in the typological study of differential marking, as opposed to differential P indexing or differential A flagging. This paper scrutinizes various cases of both differential A and P indexing and examines structural and functional differences and similarities. It will be shown that exploring differential indexing helps to understand how indexing in general is linked to referential prominence which surfaces as factors such as identifiability, animacy or topicality. Cases where indexing is particularly sensitive to referential prominence, and where it thus is employed only if the referent fulfills certain criteria, bring out the fact that A and P indexing have a common purpose, namely tracking referents through discourse. In this context, the paper also points out that differential A indexing presents an exception from generalizations concerning the amount of material in coding asymmetries.

The present study is an investigation of the information-structural notion of focus through the morphosyntax of focus structures in Mùwe Ké (Tibeto-Burman, Mugu, Nepal).  The focus structures mainly involve the obligatory marking of actors with the otherwise-optional ergative marker -gane/-gadiː and a preferred immediately preverbal position, both of which are shown to correlate with the notion of focus.  The research and analyses are based on a corpus of field data collected over three years in Nepal, including the Questionnaire on Information Structure (Skopeteas et al. 2006).  The paper is intended as a partner for and precursor to Archer (under review), which questions the notion of focus as a category and subsequently reanalyses the data presented here.

We report the results of one visual-world eye-tracking experiment and two referent selection tasks in which we investigated the effects of information structure in the form of prosody and word order manipulation on the processing of subject pronouns er and der in German. Factors such as subject-hood, focus, and topicality, as well as order of mention have been linked to an increased probability of certain referents being selected as the pronoun's antecedent and described as increasing this referent's prominence, salience, or accessibility. The goal of this study was to find out whether pronoun processing is primarily guided by linguistic factors (e.g., grammatical role) or nonlinguistic factors (e.g., first-mention), and whether pronoun interpretation can be described in terms of referents' "prominence" / "accessibility" / "salience." The results showed an overall subject preference for er, whereas der was affected by the object role and focus marking. While focus increases the attentional load and enhances memory representation for the focused referent making the focused referent more available, ultimately it did not affect the final interpretation of er, suggesting that "prominence" or the related concepts do not explain referent selection preferences. Overall, the results suggest a primacy of linguistic factors in determining pronoun resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the variation in information structure of Estonian -des, -mata and -maks constructions, and analyzes the factors influencing this variation. The paper describes information structure via the categories of information status and information role. Information status, which refers to the general pragmatic status of a linguistic unit, has two possible values: an information unit or an element of an information unit. Information role refers to the pragmatic status of an element in the information structure of a larger information unit. Information role has five possible values: focus, background of the comment, topic, frame or prominent element. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, this article gives an account of the variation in the information status and information role of Estonian converb constructions. In addition, this paper discusses the way in which the relevant explanatory variables relate to the information status and role of converb constructions. This analysis gives an overview of how the information status of converb constructions relates to the presence of punctuation, the position of the converb construction relative to the main clause, the number of words in the converb construction, the semantic function of the converb construction, the position of the converb within the construction, the morphological form of the converb, and the number of modifiers of the converb. This analysis also discusses how the information role of converb constructions relates to the position and semantic function of the construction and the presence of a lexicogrammatical prominence marker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It remains an open question whether second language (L2) learners can process linguistic properties at the syntax–discourse interface. This study examines this issue in the context of the L2 processing of Korean dative sentences under different information structure requirements. Given that discourse constraints associated with information structure tend to manifest more strongly in noncanonical than in canonical structures, we tested whether L2 learners of Korean show sensitivity to such constraints during online processing. In a story-continuation task, both native and nonnative speaker groups showed a strong preference for producing canonical dative patterns, indicating their comparable knowledge of the canonical status of Korean dative sentences. In a self-paced reading task, both groups spent longer reading times when the word order of dative sentences did not follow given–new information structure, but only for the noncanonical and not the canonical structure. These results suggest that L2 processing of dative structures at the syntax–discourse interface relies on the same parsing architecture that guides native-speaker processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to examine whether a crosslinguistic influence (CLI) is exerted on the referring expressions of the spoken narratives of Japanese–English bilingual children in different discourse contexts. Thirteen early bilingual (school-age) children separately presented Japanese and English narratives for a wordless picture book and a speechless video clip. Further, seven Japanese and nine English monolingual children participated as controls. The linguistic devices that the children adopted to introduce, reintroduce, and maintain the topic were compared with those of their monolingual controls to detect any CLI. As predicted, CLI for English on Japanese was observed but not vice versa. In Japanese, bilinguals utilize significantly more noun phrases (NPs) compared with their monolingual counterparts. More crucially, this was observed only in the referent reintroduction context, indicating that only discourse contexts that require the integration of much pragmatic information may be vulnerable to English influence. Null forms are barely utilized in English narratives; thus, no influence from Japanese was observed. We present the referential choice patterns in the elicited spoken narratives of bilingual school-age children acquiring an under-researched language pair. By controlling for the discourse context, we demonstrate that CLI is more likely to manifest in the reintroduction context. These findings offer additional evidence for the interface and structural overlap hypothesis, further highlighting the criticality of considering information structure as an influencing condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the coordination of a supplier–retailer supply chain where, in addition to classical contract considerations, a supplier decides the adoption of an information structure (IS) for the supply chain, with a higher‐quality IS allowing the supply chain parties to obtain a more accurate demand forecast. Because a wholesale price contract cannot coordinate the supply chain due to misaligned incentives of supply chain parties, we explore what common coordinating contracts in the classical coordination literature can continue coordinating the supply chain with the IS adoption. Interestingly, our analysis appears to reveal the power of simplicity: some simple classical coordinating contracts (e.g., the buy‐back and revenue‐sharing contracts), though not designed with the IS consideration, still coordinate the supply chain, whereas other more complicated classical contracts (e.g., the quantity flexibility and sales rebate contracts) fail to do so. We derive a general condition for supply chain coordination and show that any contract with a newsvendor‐like transfer payment can coordinate the supply chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: In this paper, we studied how native (L1) speakers of Russian and speakers of Mandarin Chinese learning Russian as a foreign language (L2) process Russian sentences with different word orders. We compared SVO (canonical) and OVS (non-canonical) orders in isolation and in context. Experiments focusing on the L2 processing of different word orders are still not very numerous, and those using context are extremely rare. Methods: In Experiment 1, target sentences were presented in isolation. In Experiment 2, one-sentence contexts introduced one NP mentioned in the target sentence, either the first (so that given information preceded new information, which is characteristic for Russian and many other languages) or the second. As a result, two factors could be compared: the syntactic (word order) and the contextual (whether the context is appropriate from the information-structural perspective). We used different measures to capture online and offline effects: word-by-word reading times, question-answering accuracy and sentence rating on a 1 to 5 scale (for L1 participants). Results and discussion: In both experiments, RTs and question-answering accuracy data showed that non-canonical orders were difficult for L2 participants, but not for L1 participants. However, L1 participants gave non-canonical orders lower ratings in isolation, presumably because in naturally occurring texts, they are used only in particular contexts. As for the context factor in Experiment 2, some effects were the same for L1 and L2 processing: all participants read given NPs faster than new ones and preferred sentences with a 'given -- new' word order. The latter may reflect the universal principles of narrative coherence. However, unlike native speakers, L2 readers are not sensitive to more subtle contextual requirements of different word orders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Signos is the property of Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

We analyze the properties and characteristics of the information structure in incomplete lattice-valued information system (ILIS), we redefine the information structure and the dependence and information distance between the two information structures. In addition, in order to evaluate the uncertainty of ILIS, the concepts of granular measure and entropy measure are expounded, including information granulation, information quantity, rough entropy and information entropy. Finally, we carry out numerical experiments to verify the feasibility of the method, and carry out effective statistical analysis. These results are conducive to the establishment of granular computing framework in ILIS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of prosody in a little-studied type of non-canonical questions: syntactically and lexically canonical interrogative sentences that have been uttered by the speaker in order to express surprise. The study compares Estonian surprise questions with string-identical information-seeking questions elicited by means of context descriptions. The materials comprise 1,008 utterances by 21 speakers. It is concluded that the prosody of the examined utterances has three roles that are relevant to the expression of surprise by ordinary interrogative sentences. First, the enhanced prosodic realisation of the utterances as manifested in a longer duration, a wider pitch range, and a more frequent occurrence of upstepped pitch accents conveys emotional expressivity. Second, lower pitch along with the creaky voice quality signals that the utterances are not canonical questions, while the main prosodic correlate of information-seeking questions is high pitch. Phonological pitch accents and boundary tones, however, are not used to distinguish between surprise questions and information-seeking questions. Third, the nuclear accent placement signals an information structure that is associated with the expression of incongruity or counterexpectation: the focal accent can evoke an alternative (set) that arises from the speaker's expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of works have assumed the existence of so-called "low focus movement" in Brazilian Portuguese, that is, focus-driven movement to a sentence-internal, postverbal position (FocP) in the left periphery of vP, in line with what was proposed by Belletti (2004) for Italian. By analyzing novel evidence from ditransitive and wh-in situ constructions, I argue that the postulation of low focus movement in Brazilian Portuguese faces a number of empirical challenges and that, contrary to the literature, such operation is in fact unavailable in the language; in other words, postverbal focalization and wh-in situ are better analyzed as being truly in situ. As a consequence, I maintain that the clausal structure of Brazilian Portuguese does not include a low focus projection such as Belletti's (2004), and that Rizzi's (1997) Focus Criterion is not operative in the language. I finally discuss the consequences of those claims to the analysis of traditional left-peripheral focalization, which I maintain is not due to the need to satisfy the Focus Criterion, but is instead licensed when other semantic and/or pragmatic effects co-occur with focalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article investigates Beserman constructions which contain adjectives inflected for number and nouns that they modify semantically. Prototypically adjectives do not show agreement in number with the head noun. Under certain circumstances, however, they may be marked for number by a nominal plural suffix -(j)os and a 3Sg possessive marker, or by a predicative adjectival suffix -(j)eś. Elicitation and corpus data show that constructions with the suffix -(j)os and a 3Sg possessive marker are used in contrastive contexts. As for -(j)eś-marked adjectives, we claim that two types of construction should be distinguished. Postposed -(j)eś-marked adjectives, according to syntactic tests, retain their original predicative properties. Preposed -(j)eś-marked adjectives share important properties with “prototypical” attributes in Beserman, and may be used under various information structure conditions, thus drifting towards holding the status of pure agreement constructions. Kokkuvõte. Maria Usacheva, Maria Brykina: Besermani mitmuslike omadussõnadega konstruktsioonide süntaktilised omadused ja infostruktuur. Käesolev artikkel uurib Besermani keele konstruktsioone, mis hõlmavad arvus käänatud omadussõnu ja neid täiendavaid nimisõnu. Prototüüpselt omadussõnad ei ühildu arvus nominaalse põhisõnaga. Teatud tingimustel võivad nad siiski arvu väljendada nominaalse mitmuse sufiksi -(j)os ja kolmanda isiku ainsuse possessiivsufiksiga või predikatiivse adjektiivsufiksiga -(j)eś. Me usume, et sufiksiga -(j)os ja kolmanda isiku ainsuse possessiiv- suffiksiga konstruktsioonid on atributiivse nominalisatsiooni näited. Korpuse andmed ja küsitlus näitavad, et neid kasutatakse kontrasti väljendamiseks. Mis puudutab -(j)eś-markeriga omadussõnu, siis väidame, et eristada tuleks kahte tüüpi konstruktsioone. Järelasendis -(j)eś-markeriga omadussõnad säilitavad süntaktiliste testide kohaselt oma esialgsed predikatiivsed omadused. Eesasendis -(j)eś-markeriga omadussõnad jagavad olulisi omadusi “prototüüpsete” Besermani atribuutidega ja neid võib kasutada erinevates infostruktuuri tingimustes, mis lähendab neid ühildumiskonstruktsioonidele.

Intonation is an instrument for structuring discourse and emphasizing different types of information. In German, for example, pitch is used to highlight focus, while in Vietnamese, different pitch contours distinguish lexical tones. As of yet, the interplay between intonation and lexical tone in relation to information structure has not been sufficiently investigated across languages. Vietnamese has six lexical tones and is particularly interesting for investigating the influence of different intonation strategies on the realization of tones. Here, we present a production study with 70 Northern Vietnamese speakers. The participants read six sentences under two conditions. In each sentence, a word occurring in the final position of the sentence and carrying one of the six tones was pronounced in two different discourse contexts. Acoustic analyses of the intonation contours showed that Vietnamese speakers realized the words with significant differences in pitch at the onset. Yet, the strategies for raising or lowering the pitch varied depending on the tone. Our results show the use of prosodic cues in a complex tone system across a large number of speakers. In addition, the study can serve as a starting point for educational programs that include training on intonation patterns in specific contexts.

This paper explores a newly identified contrastive topic configuration in Spanish. Coined by de Andrade (2018) for Galician and European Portuguese, the D(emonstrative)-construction features a left-dislocated topic and d(emonstrative)-pronoun resumptive. This study investigates whether the D-construction exists in Spanish, and if so, with which syntactic properties. We administered an acceptability judgment task on the D-construction, Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD), Hanging Topic Left Dislocation (HTLD) and Focus Fronting (FF) to Spanish speakers. The task tested the role of the left-dislocate, case connectivity, subject-verb inversion, embedding, recursivity, and sensitivity to island constraints. Simple instances of the D-construction received consistently high ratings, demonstrating that it exists in Spanish. There was individual variation regarding the role of the left-dislocate and case connectivity. The D-construction did not require subject-verb inversion, was non-recursive and demonstrated selective island sensitivity. Findings for CLLD, HTLD and FF were mostly in line with previous literature. The D-construction did not exactly pattern with CLLD, HTLD, nor FF; it is characterized by a unique set of syntactic properties. We propose that both left-dislocated elements are base-generated at Spec, TopP: the fronted DP is a hanging topic, and its resumptive d-pronoun is linked to a clitic within the main clause via an A'-chain.

Verum focus has long been analysed as part of information structure, being accounted for within a theory of focus as generation of alternatives on a polarity value. Recently, however, this view has been challenged, with some authors arguing for a separation between verum and focus. The empirical debate focuses on two types of strategies: either verum is marked identically to focus (e.g., pitch accent in German, English) or through a dedicated strategy (e.g., dedicated markers in Gitksan, Bura, South Marghi). On the basis of the second type, it has been argued that the link between focus and verum is only superficial, with verum instead arising from a lexical operator VERUM. In this paper, we provide evidence in support of the traditional link between truth marking and focus, using original field data on the morphosyntactic expression of information structure in 11 Bantu (Niger-Congo) languages. By working from function to form, we show that these languages use a variety of grammatical strategies for truth expression, strategies that are used elsewhere in the information structural system for backgrounding. In this way, verum is not directly marked by focal accent but marked indirectly via backgrounding, which we formulate as the Backgrounding and Underspecification Thesis (BUT). On the basis of this Bantu evidence, we add a third type of strategy to the typology, where verum is marked indirectly via backgrounding. We use this updated typology to argue in favour of maintaining a conceptual link between verum, polarity focus, and predicated-centred focus more broadly.

Este trabajo presenta un estudio sobre los patrones de doblado en español que sigue la línea de análisis de Muñoz Pérez y Verdecchia (2022). Se introduce un patrón de doblado que no se ha discutido previamente en la bibliografía, el doblado clausal, y se compara este patrón con el doblado de predicados. Se argumenta que ambos patrones tienen en esencia la misma estructura, pero se distinguen por la naturaleza de los constituyentes que se encuentran dislocados en cada una. Este factor da lugar a una serie de diferencias formales e interpretativas que se capturan a partir de un análisis unificado.

This article discusses the linear placement of the syntactic function of subject in Northern Mansi, concentrating on the less frequent non-clause-initial placement, and differences between the nature of subject in active (SA) and passive (SP) clauses. The study is realized as a template analysis. The main aim of this study is to elaborate and expand on my previous template analysis on Northern Mansi constituent order (Virtanen 2021), regarding the subjects of both active and passive clauses. The data used in the study are gathered from ÐÓ¯Ð¸Ð¼Ä ÑÑÌÑÐ¸Ð¿Ð¾Ñ [LÅ«imÄ SÄripos], the only up-to-date Mansi newspaper. The most remarkable result of this study is that the majority of the non-clause-initial subjects are pragmatically focal, which affects the linear placement of the subject. This finding does not overrule the earlier findings concerning the correlation between primary topic and subjects, but it refines the whole picture.

This paper investigates the referential information structure (IS) of full and reduced specificational it-clefts, which interacts as a distinct layer with their relational IS. Drawing on spontaneous spoken data from the London-Lund Corpus, this study examines how discourse-new and discourse-given information, i.e., referential IS, is distributed over the clefted noun phrase (NP) and cleft-relative clause. To assess the discourse-familiarity of nominal referents and open propositions, I develop an analytical model hinging on the predictability of information in accordance with the prospective dynamic of spoken language. The findings show that the distribution of given and new information is more diverse than described in existing typologies. In particular, it is revealed that the hitherto overlooked pattern in which both value and variable are discourse-given and in which the specification relation may be new or given is in fact the most common one. The findings also show that the choice between full and reduced it-clefts as two basic options is only partly motivated by the discourse-familiarity of the variable. The analysis of the prosodically coded relational IS reveals that multiple prosodic patterns can be mapped onto each category of clefts, thus demonstrating that the conflation of the referential and relational IS of it-clefts is untenable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article investigates Beserman constructions which contain adjectives inflected for number and nouns that they modify semantically. Prototypically adjectives do not show agreement in number with the head noun. Under certain circumstances, however, they may be marked for number by a nominal plural suffix ‑(j)os and a 3Sg possessive marker, or by a predicative adjectival suffix ‑(j)eś. Elicitation and corpus data show that constructions with the suffix ‑(j)os and a 3Sg possessive marker are used in contrastive contexts. As for -(j)eś-marked adjectives, we claim that two types of construction should be distinguished. Postposed -(j)eś-marked adjectives, according to syntactic tests, retain their original predicative properties. Preposed -(j)eś-marked adjectives share important properties with "prototypical" attributes in Beserman, and may be used under various information structure conditions, thus drifting towards holding the status of pure agreement constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on four experiments aiming to examine immediate post-sentential recall of core sentence information (conveyed by direct objects), and optional/additional information (conveyed by temporal or locative adjuncts). Participants read simple and unambiguous Czech sentences such as Starší důchodce velmi pečlivě pročetl noviny v neděli v knihovně : "An older retiree read the newspaper very carefully on Sunday in the library." Sentences always appeared as a whole after pressing a space bar. Immediately after the sentence disappeared, an open-ended (free response) question was presented targeting either the direct object (e.g., newspaper), temporal adjunct (e.g., on Sunday), or locative adjunct (e.g., in the library). Altogether, it was found that the core information (conveyed by the direct object) was recalled almost perfectly, whereas additional information, conveyed by temporal and locative adjuncts, was recalled with significantly lower accuracy rates. Information structure also played a role: if the temporal or locative adjunct was focused, it was recalled better than if it was unfocused. The present article thus shows systematic differences in recall success for different pieces of information. These findings suggest the presence of selective attention mechanisms during early stages of sentence processing. Factors such as syntactic function or information structure influence the degree of attention to different pieces of information conveyed by a sentence. In turn, certain pieces of information may not be consciously accessible already after the sentence is processed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of CIRCULO de Linguistica Aplicada a la Comunicacion is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This research tried to investigate a specific case of pronominal enclitic (eš/aš) in colloquial Persian based on functional approach. Two novels including a total of 56,500 words and the data on the internet were used as corpus. A corpus of 110 sentences with the desired structure were extracted. The investigation revealed that the reference of pronominal enclitic is the common and assumed knowledge of interlocutors which might be represented as a proposition in the discourse or activated by an element in the language. The pronominal enclitic is structurally a presupposition trigger and adjuncts (rastaš, haqiqataš, vaqeiataš) are discourse markers. The reference enclitic holds old information and is a specified definite. The predicate following enclitic holds new information and is a specified indefinite. This predicate contains focal information. The third fason singular enclitic appears both as an adjunct and as a clause at the beginning of the sentence and can be omitted. Their semantic and pragmatic function is truth assertion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Diachronica is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper presents a study on Spanish doubling patterns that follows the line of analysis advanced by Muñoz Pérez and Verdecchia (2022). It introduces a doubling pattern that has not been previously discussed in the literature, clausal doubling, and compares it with predicate doubling. It argues that both patterns have essentially the same structure but are distinguished by the nature of the constituents that are dislocated in each case. This factor triggers a number of formal and interpretative differences that are captured by a unified analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary goal of this paper is to understand the information structure of right dislocation (RD). I report a variation in RD in Asian languages with regard to the information structural status of the right dislocated elements. The discussion focuses on Alasha, a Mongolic language spoken in Mongolia. Through a comparative perspective on right dislocation, I show that RD languages come in two types: one that allows focused elements to be right dislocated, and one that disallows focused elements to be right dislocated. I argue that Alasha belongs to the former type, and I propose a bi-clausal analysis of Alasha RD, where Focus movement may occur in the second clause. Drawing on these findings, I further argue that the variation in RD is due to the parametric difference on the licensing condition of Focus Projection in Asian languages. Ultimately, the findings of this paper strengthen a non-uniform approach to RD in natural languages in both syntactic structure and information structure, despite their surface similarities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an effort to enhance students' English reading ability and thinking quality, this study proposes a 3-Step Mind Map Approach based on information structure and image schema. A comparative experiment was conducted in a senior high school setting with 78 students to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach. The experimental class, taught through the 3-Step Mind Map Approach, outperformed the control class, instructed with traditional methods, in both reading ability and thinking quality. This study highlights the potential of using mind maps as a useful tool in English reading teaching and promoting students' thinking quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Résumé: Partant de l'hypothèse de Coveney (1995) que la structure informationnelle influence la sélection de l'interrogative in situ 'Tu fais quoi ?' (SVQ), ce travail s'appuie sur les données du Corpus suisse de SMS (2009-2015) pour évaluer l'incidence des principes dits 'End-Weight' et 'End-Focus'. En suivant l'étude de Coveney (1995), nous analyserons l'incidence des paramètres suivants : (i) longueur de la proforme Q et (ii) celle de la partie SVC; paramètres du (iii) Sujet, (iv) Verbe, (v) Complément; et (vi) identité du mot Q. Suite à l'analyse de 217 occurrences de SVQ (sur 425 QU), nos résultats corroborent, fût-ce avec quelques nuances, plusieurs tendances observées par Coveney (1995). En même temps, notre étude révèle que les tendances en cause, telles qu'elles s'observent dans le Corpus de SMS, prennent la forme plus extrême et tendent à fonctionner comme des environnements morphosyntaxiques à variabilité faible : en débouchant régulièrement sur l'emploi de SVQ, elles réduisent drastiquement les chances d'apparition d'autres variantes ex situ. Ces tendances s'expliqueraient par le fait qu'en français informel l'usage de SVQ est en train d'évincer d'autres variantes, principalement dans ces contextes linguistiques qui se sont avérés initialement propices à sa rapide propagation au 20e siècle (Farmer 2015). Following the hypothesis of Coveney (1995) that the informational structure impacts the selection of the French interrogative structure in situ 'Tu fais quoi ?' (SVQ), this study analyses the data from the Swiss SMS Corpus (2009-2015) and assesses the role of the 'End-Weight' and 'End-Focus' principles. In the light of the study by Coveney (1995), we will analyze the impact of the following parameters: (i) length of the Wh - element and (ii) that of the SVC part; parameters of (iii) Subject, (iv) Verb, (v) Complement; and (vi) identity of the Wh - element. Based on the analysis of 217 tokens of SVQ (out of 425 QU), our results confirm, although with some nuances, several tendencies established by Coveney (1995). Moreover, our study reveals that the tendencies observed in the SMS Corpus take a more extreme form and tend to function as morphosyntactic environments with low variability: leading regularly to the use of SVQ, they drastically reduce the chances of appearance of ex situ interrogatives. These trends could be explained by the fact that the use of SVQ in informal French is supplanting today other variants, mainly in those linguistic contexts which initially proved conducive to its rapid spread in the 20th century (Farmer 2015). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of pre-nuclear prominences for focus marking has been largely neglected. Recent studies, however, present first evidence that the prosody of the pre-nuclear region indicates its status as part of a broad focus or as pre-focal. This study presents a systematic investigation of the pre-nuclear domain and its relation to the nuclear accent in German. The results show that the realization of the pre-nuclear domain indeed depends on whether it is focal or pre-focal: The pre-nuclear noun is characterized by larger F0 excursions, higher F0 maxima and larger durations when it is in broad focus than when it precedes a narrow focus. Furthermore, the realization of a pre-focal, pre-nuclear domain depends on the following focus: The pre-nuclear noun is produced with smaller F0 excursions, lower F0 maxima and shorter durations before a corrective focus than before a non-corrective narrow focus. The comparison to the nuclear accent suggests an inverse relationship, i.e., the pre-nuclear domain becomes less prominent when the nuclear domain becomes more prominent. The findings suggest that the phonetic manifestation of information structure is distributed over larger prosodic domains and entails the modulation of phrasal prominence profiles rather than just local adjustments of the nucleus.

IntroductionIn this paper, we studied how native (L1) speakers of Russian and speakers of Mandarin Chinese learning Russian as a foreign language (L2) process Russian sentences with different word orders. We compared SVO (canonical) and OVS (non-canonical) orders in isolation and in context. Experiments focusing on the L2 processing of different word orders are still not very numerous, and those using context are extremely rare.MethodsIn Experiment 1, target sentences were presented in isolation. In Experiment 2, one-sentence contexts introduced one NP mentioned in the target sentence, either the first (so that given information preceded new information, which is characteristic for Russian and many other languages) or the second. As a result, two factors could be compared: the syntactic (word order) and the contextual (whether the context is appropriate from the information-structural perspective). We used different measures to capture online and offline effects: word-by-word reading times, question-answering accuracy and sentence rating on a 1 to 5 scale (for L1 participants).Results and discussionIn both experiments, RTs and question-answering accuracy data showed that non-canonical orders were difficult for L2 participants, but not for L1 participants. However, L1 participants gave non-canonical orders lower ratings in isolation, presumably because in naturally occurring texts, they are used only in particular contexts. As for the context factor in Experiment 2, some effects were the same for L1 and L2 processing: all participants read given NPs faster than new ones and preferred sentences with a ‘given – new’ word order. The latter may reflect the universal principles of narrative coherence. However, unlike native speakers, L2 readers are not sensitive to more subtle contextual requirements of different word orders.

The present study aimed to investigate diachronic changes in the frequency and function of marked syntactic structures, namely passive constructions, preposing, and cleft sentences that manifest information structural elements in Persian. The study examined these structures across three periods of Persian, i.e., Middle Persian, Dari, and Modern Persian. The data for Middle Persian is sourced from The Mēnōg-ī Khrad and Oshnar-I Dana, while for Dari, Tārīkh-i Bayhaqī and Safarnāma by Nasir Khusraw are used. For Modern Persian, written resources from various genres, such as short stories and scientific articles, are analyzed. The samples from each period are analyzed to determine the function and frequency of marked syntactic structures, which are then compared to identify any potential changes in their usage over time. The findings indicated that the frequency and function of these syntactic structures have changed over time. The findings suggested that passive constructions were commonly used across all three periods to present the patient as the pragmatic topic and maintain the topic-focus order. However, in modern Persian, passive construction was also used to emphasize the patient as the focus. Cleft constructions were not found in Middle Persian, but the increase in frequency of cleft constructions in Dari can be attributed to the fact that in this period, cleft sentences were used similarly to preposing, in order to observe the principle of separation of role and reference, rather than focusing on specific elements. Nonetheless, in modern Persian, cleft constructions were used to exclude other possibilities and emphasize the selected element as the focus. Preposing structures were used to present an element as the topic and provide new information about it. This study contributes to our understanding of language change and provides insights into the evolution of Persian syntax over time.

One characteristic of multilingual speakers is that in everyday life, they may integrate elements from their languages in the same sentence or discourse, a practice known as code-switching. This paper examines code-switching at the interfaces, in particular as related to information structure. Despite the fact that a core question of modern linguistic theory is how syntactic and information-structural theories interact in accounting for licensing of different grammatical phenomena, there has been relatively little literature on code-switching and information structure. In this paper, we provide an overview of the available literature on code-switching across different language combinations, focusing in particular on subject pronoun–verb switches, ellipsis, light verbs, topic/focus particles, and code-switching between sign languages. We argue that the study of the interplay between information structure and code-switching sheds light on our understanding of multilingual grammars and language competence more generally. In this regard, we discuss theoretical and methodological considerations to guide future studies.