Inhalt
THEORETICAL LINGUISTICS Vol 27.2/3 2001
Special issue
On this page, we can only provide the abstracts of the contributions.
KLAUS VON HEUSINGER and KERSTIN SCHWABE DINA BRUN WERNER FREY M. HEGARTY et. al. HORST LOHNSTEIN
ANITA STEUBE
CARLA UMBACH |
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NP-interpretation, i.e. the interpretation of definite and indefinite NPs, is one of the central issues in modern semantics. Research into the semantic structure of NPs and their referential behavior is one of the driving forces for developing new semantic theories, which will be illustrated on four key issues: definite description, (in)definiteness, dynamic semantics, and specificity. Frege's treatment of indefinite NPs and Russell's analysis of definite NPs as quantifiers raised important issues of reference, the semantic structure of atomic sentences and the relation between syntactic categories and semantic types. The analysis of (in)definiteness as a discourse pragmatic notion and its representation at an additional level opened the way for a new family of semantic theories. Theories, like Discourse Representation Theory or File Change Semantics, understand definiteness and anaphoricity as two aspects of familiarity. The analysis of cross-sentential anaphoric expressions converted semantic theory into dynamic frameworks that describe the meaning of a sentence as a relation between two information states. Recently, the referential manifoldness of indefinite NPs came into the focus of attention of semantic and syntactic theories. The contrast between "specific" and "non-specific" readings of indefinite NPs are used to explain the particular movement properties and certain referential options of indefinite NPs. Even though there is no common agreement of the semantic representation of specificity (see the special issue "Specificity" in the Journal of Semantics 2002 for an overview of recent theories), it is quite clear that we need a more fine-grained semantic structure to represent specificity. Information structure seems to provide this additional fine-grained structure. Information structure is taken as a cover term for thematic structure, theme-rheme structure, topic-comment structure or some other terminology for describing the communicative structure of a sentence. In the late 19th century, information structure was introduced into linguistic descriptions as an alternative or additional level to syntactic structure. It became famous in the guise of the Prague theory of functional sentence perspective ("Funktionale Satzperspektive") which describes the elements of a sentence with respect to their communicative function for the recipients. Information structure comprises (at least) two aspects: First the discourse anchoring of expressions (given vs. new), and second the sentence internal structure of what-is-said-about-what (topic vs. comment). There are ongoing attempts to account for information structure in semantic theories. The most prominent effort is the development of focus semantics in order to account for focus structure in terms of sentence semantics. Other areas of the interaction of information structure with semantics, in particular NP-semantics, are: Focus and definite NPs, discourse semantics and (in)definiteness in languages without articles, syntactic reflexes of different referential properties of indefinite NPs, anaphoricity and information structure, to name only a few areas of interaction. The following papers address these and other questions of the interface between NP-interpretation and information structure from different perspective. They are listed in alphabetical order: Dina Brun argues in her paper Information Structure and the Status of NP in Russian that the indefinite or definite interpre-tation of Russian bare NPs de-pend on their information structural status in the clause. She argues for certain correlations between the organization of discourse and the positions in which the (in)definite nominals may appear within a sentence of Russian. Her examination of the information structure of Russian sentences provides a new account of their organization with respect to information packaging. The final goal of the paper is to establish and motivate a system of correlations between various types of NPs and functions of information structure. In his paper about the Whereabouts of Indefinites, Werner Frey characterizes three different domains in the German middle field which are relevant for the interpretation of an indefinite. He argues that the so called 'strong' reading of an indefinite is the basic one and that the 'weak' reading needs special licensing which is mirrored by certain syntactic requirements. Some popular claims about the relation between the position and the interpretation of indefinites as well as some claims about scrambling are discussed and rejected. He concludes that the strong reading of an indefinite is independent of its information status. Michael Hegarty, Jeanette Gundel, and Kaja Borthen discuss the difference between the accessibility of antecedents of demonstrative and personal pronouns. In their paper Information structure and the accessibility of clausally introduced referents, they argue hat clausally introduced entities, immediately subsequent to their introduction into a discourse, are typically accessible to reference with a demonstrative pronoun, but not with the personal pronoun it. They base their claim on the observation that such entities are typically activated, but not brought into focus, upon their introduction to a discourse. Horst Lohnstein presents a compositional theory of German sentence mood and sentence type distinctions. His article Sentence Mood constitution and indefinite noun phrases proposes a theory of sentence mood constitution in German and investigates the interaction determined by binding theory between pronouns and indefinite noun phrases which are semantically analysed as choice functions. He shows that the semantic objects determined by sentence mood define different kinds of domains which have to be uniquely accessible as the range of the choice function. He derives the various properties of the pronominal binding of indefinites by the interplay of the proposed theoretical notions. Anita Steube discusses the possibilities to correct a sentence of a communicative partner. In her contribution Correction by contrastive focus, she goes into the grammatical and information structural peculiarities of backward-related German corrigens sentences which deviate from so many syntactic and prosodic principles of German categorical sentences. She offers a formal semantic description for them in a two-level semantics. Carla Umbach discusses the contrast between new and given information with respect to definite NPs. Her paper (De)accenting definite descrip-tions shows that a definite description refers to a given discourse referent if the descriptive content is completely deaccented. On the other hand, if part of the descriptive material is focused, the definite NP introduces a novel discourse referent. She integrates these observation into a semantics for definite NPs. This special issue grow out of the workshop Information Structure and the Referential Status of Linguistic Expressions during the annual meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Sprachwissenschaft (German Society of Linguistics) in Leipzig in February 2001. We also invited one paper (Frey) which were presented at the workshop Sentence Type and Specificity at the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft und Typologie (ZAS) in March 2001 in Berlin. A different selection of papers from these two workshops will be published as a special issue "Information Structure and Sentence Type" in the next issue of this journal. We specially like to thank the reviewers for their detailed and constructive comments on the first versions of the papers. Special thanks go to Mechthild Bernhard and Paul David Doherty for their helping hand in preparing the contributions for publication. Finally, we like to thank Manfred Krifka for inviting us to this special issue and Ursula Kleinhenz for her constructive, friendly and helpful cooperation on the side of the publishers. |