An Underspecified HPSG Representation for Information Structure

Information structure can be of great use in linguistic applications, especially in those involving a speech component. However, focus marking by prosody is often ambiguous. Existing theories capture this by rules that produce alternative focus structures. This disjunction is hard to handle computationally. In this paper, a compact, graphically underspecified representation is proposed, along with composition principles and a resolution routine based on context information.