A Modular Account of Information Structure in Extensible Dependency Grammar

We introduce a modular, dependency-based formalization of Information Structure (IS) based on Steedman's prosodic account [1,2]. We state it in terms of Extensible Dependency Grammar (XDG) [3], introducing two new dimensions modeling 1) prosodic structure, and 2) theme/rheme and focus/background partitionings. The approach goes without a non-standard syntactic notion of constituency and can be straightforwardly extended to model interactions between IS and other dimensions such as word order.

[1]  Charles N. Li,et al.  Subject and topic , 1979 .

[2]  Ralph Debusmann,et al.  Topological Dependency Trees: A Constraint-Based Account of Linear Precedence , 2001, ACL.

[3]  Gert Smolka,et al.  A Relational Syntax-Semantics Interface Based on Dependency Grammar , 2004, COLING.

[4]  M. Halliday.  NOTES ON TRANSITIVITY AND THEME IN ENGLISH. PART 2 , 1967 .

[5]  Mark Steedman,et al.  Information Based Intonation Synthesis , 1994, HLT.

[6]  E. Engdahl,et al.  The linguistic realization of information packaging , 2013 .

[7]  Enric Vallduv,et al.  The linguistic realisation of information packaging , 2007 .

[8]  Igor Mel’čuk,et al.  Dependency Syntax: Theory and Practice , 1987 .

[9]  Malgorzata Stys,et al.  Incorporating Discourse Aspects in English - Polish MT: Towards Robust Implementation , 1995, ArXiv.

[10]  G. J. M. Kruij.  A Categorial-Modal Architecture of Informativity , 2001 .

[11]  Lucien Tesnière.  Éléments de syntaxe structurale , 1959 .

[12]  Joachim Niehren,et al.  The XDG Grammar Development Kit , 2004, MOZ.

[13]  Petr Sgall,et al.  The Meaning Of The Sentence In Its Semantic And Pragmatic Aspects , 1986 .

[14]  Denys Duchier,et al.  Information Structure in Topological Dependency Grammar , 2003, EACL.

[15]  Mark Steedman,et al.  Information Structure and the Syntax-Phonology Interface , 2000, Linguistic Inquiry.

[16]  Marie-Hélène Candito,et al.  A principle-based hierarchical representation of LTAGs , 1996, COLING.

[17]  Mark Steedman,et al.  The syntactic process , 2004, Language, speech, and communication.

[18]  Marie-Hélène Candito.  Generating an LTAG out of a Principle-based Hierarchical Representation , 1996, ACL.

[19]  Ondrej Bojar.  Problems of Inducing Large Coverage Constraint-Based Dependency Grammar for Czech , 2004, CSLP.

[20]  Denys Duchier,et al.  Metagrammar Redux , 2004, CSLP.

[21]  W. Chafe.  Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view , 1976 .

[22]  Jason Baldridge,et al.  Generalizing Dimensionality in Combinatory Categorial Grammar , 2004, COLING.