Reading Questions
On 2/18, we will each read a different paper on information
structure in a non-English language. We'll register the papers we've
chosen on the GoPost
bulletin board. Please be sure to choose papers that represent a
variety of language families, and that study information structural
notions with morphosyntactic reflexes. (It's okay if there's
phonological information there, too, but strictly phonological
expression is less interesting for the purposes of this course.)
In class,
we'll discuss the papers jointly to get a sense of crosslinguistic
variation. Please be prepared to answer the following questions
about your paper:
- What information structural contrasts are described?
- What (if any) tests are proposed for different information structural notions?
- How do these contrasts and tests relate to the definitions of topic and focus from 1/21 and 1/28?
- How are the information structural notions marked in the morphology, syntax or phonology of the language?
- What, if any, representations are proposed in the paper, and how are the representations related to the phonological and morphosyntactic structure?
In addition, it would be interesting to be able to discuss
the following:
- How can these contrasts be represented in MRS?
- How can the morphosyntactic reflexes be represented in HPSG?
- How will the morphosyntax-information structure interface work?
Last modified: Sat Jan 9 23:12:18 PST 2010