Re: THEORY: Information Structure; Topic/Comment, Focus/Background, Given/New.

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Jonathan Knibb <j_knibb@H...> wrote:
> [snip]
> My difficulty is in distinguishing this use of 'about' from the
> given/new axis. Can given information occur other than within
> the topic, and can information be new when it is a topic?
> Of course a topic is new in the sentence where it is first
> introduced into the discourse - but can it be a topic *in that
> sentence*?
> [snip]
Hi Jonathan.

I Googled around with various combinations of search arguments for
several days and came across several articles written by Ivana
Kruijff-Korbayova.  She summarizes everyone's terminologies and
theories and their "pedigrees" and dependencies on each other.

Most people, she points out, have two partitions of the information
structure; for instance, topic vs comment and focus vs ground.  In at
least one article, she says who makes one of these divisions
subordinate to the other (thus coming up with a maximum of three
parts) and who makes this divisions orthogonal to each other (thus
coming up with possibly four parts).

Here are some URLs to look at;

www.iccs.informatics.ed.ac.uk/~steedman/tl/tlnotes09ahandout.pdf
www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~korbay/esslli01-wsh/Proceedings/intro.pdf
www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~korbay/Courses/esslli04/Slides/lect1.pdf
www.helsinki.fi/esslli/courses/readers/K50.pdf
www.ling.gu.se/projekt/siridus/Publications/deliv5-1.pdf
w3.msi.vxu.se/~per/IVC743/LM/wsh-is-dstr-dsem.pdf

I hope they are fun; I hope you get to read at least the shortest
ones.

(I googled on

nucleus focus known unknown presupposition theme rheme context
dependent independent accent topic comment bound unbound given new
orthogonal background structured meanings DRT alternative set narrow
wide link tail C/Q alternatives kontrast

to get them, in case I copied any of them wrong.)

Tom H.C. in MI