Investigating the role of information structure triggers

Hartmann, Jutta; Winkler, Susanne

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2013.08.003

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Information structure in texts presupposes the dichotomy of information units, namely topic and comment [9]. These information units are triggers for syntactic and semantic processes, namely word order (dislocation), prosody ((de) accentuation), and interpretation.…”

Section: A Topic-comment Structure In Linguisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Document re-ranking based on topic-comment structure

Ermakova

Mothe²

2016

2016 IEEE Tenth International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS)

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This paper introduces a novel approach for document re-ranking in information retrieval based on topic-comment structure of texts. While most information retrieval models make the assumption that relevant documents are about the query and that aboutness can be captured considering bags of words only, we rather consider a more sophisticated analysis of discourse to capture document relevance by distinguishing the topic of a text from what is said about the topic (comment) in the text. The topic-comment structure of texts is extracted automatically from the first retrieved documents which are then re-ranked so that the top documents are the ones that share their topics with the query. The evaluation on TREC collections shows that the method significantly improves the retrieval performance.

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Section: A Topic-comment Structure In Linguisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Document re-ranking based on topic-comment structure

Ermakova

Mothe²

2016

2016 IEEE Tenth International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS)

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“…3 Unless otherwise indicated, the examples in this section are taken from Paschke/Vogt (2015). 4 For definitions of information structural notions, see Krifka 2008, Baumann/Kügler 2015, Baumann/Riester 2013, Hartmann/Winkler 2013 In the following we use given or activated (Chafe 1976(Chafe , 1994 in a very broad sense. The same holds for the dichotomy focus vs. background; in this regard we distinguish between broad focus (all-new-or out-of-the-blue-contexts), whereas narrow focus comprises other forms of not broad focus such as corrective, contrastive, and verum/falsum-focus.…”

Section: Introduction: Focus Accents In German and Italianmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does pragmatic beat syntax? Evidence from focus accent placement in the semi-spontaneous speech of Italian learners of German

Vogt¹,

Paschke²

2018

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In this paper, we investigate the prosodic marking of information structure by Italian L1 learners of German. We analyze two different contexts with non-final focus accents, i. e. narrow and broad focus contexts, mainly on sentence level while most studies discussing post-focal de-accentuation are restricted to noun phrases. For Italian learners, non-final placement of focus accents is likely to cause problems, given that in their L1, phonetic prominence is normally as-signed to the last constituent in the verbal phrase. Our initial hypothesis was that the hypothetical "cognitive universal" requiring de-accentuation of given elements might probably guide the learners in realizing the correct pitch contour in contexts with a non-final narrow focus (and pragmatic de-accentuation of the final given constituent). By contrast, the de-accentuation of phrase-final lexical verbs in broad focus contexts was expected to cause more problems given that this typologically marked syntactic structure does not exist in Italian. However, in a previous study based on read speech, de-accentuation of final given elements was managed by inter-mediate Italian learners of German L2 only slightly better than realizing a non-final focus accent in all new contexts on the argument in OV structures (success rate of 55% vs. 48%, with no statistically significant difference). In other words, both types of non-final focus accents seem to be balanced at this intermediate stage of acquisition. In this contribution, our goal is to discover whether in semi-spontaneous speech one can find the same distributional patterns of non-final focus accents in this learner variety of Italian learners of German. To this end, we analyzed recordings of oral exams from the same 10 Italian university students that had taken part in the previous study. The analysis shows that in semi-spontaneous speech production too, there is evidence for the hypothesis that pragmatics does not "beat" syntax in prosodic acquisition. Besides, when the two different data types were compared, a very high intra-speaker correlation emerged between read and semi-spontaneous speech.

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Non-Final Focus Accents in The Speech of Advanced Italian Learners of German

Paschke¹,

Vogt²

2015

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This study investigates the prosodic marking of focus in non-native German. Ten proficient learners of German with Italian L1 were recorded reading aloud 40 sentences containing mostly non-final focused constituents embedded in an adequate question context. Non-final focus accents in L2 German are difficult for Italian learners to produce, especially in broad focus contexts with de-accentuation of final verb forms (cf. Paschke/Vogt, in press), because their native language has a strong positional requirement of rightmostness. Given that both German and Italian use pitch accents for information structuring, i. e. to highlight important information, a correct placement of focus accents might, however, be favoured by narrow focus contexts in which prosodic prominence has to be assigned to one specific constituent. In addition to this main hypothesis, the study investigated whether additional clues (such as prosodic highlighting of the relevant constituent in the L2 question, a corresponding syntactic and prosodic structure between L1 and L2) might increase the success rate. The data shows that advanced Italian speakers of German L2 correctly realize non-final focus accents in more than half of the narrow focus contexts, but that their success rate is not significantly higher than in the broad focus condition and is not affected by the additional clues provided.

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Investigating the role of information structure triggers

Cited by 4 publications

References 75 publications

Document re-ranking based on topic-comment structure

Document re-ranking based on topic-comment structure

Does pragmatic beat syntax? Evidence from focus accent placement in the semi-spontaneous speech of Italian learners of German

Non-Final Focus Accents in The Speech of Advanced Italian Learners of German

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