Information structure and information theory

Robin Lemke (ed), Lisa Schäfer (ed), Ingo Reich (ed)

Synopsis

This volume results from the workshop "Discourse obligates – How and why discourse limits the way we express what we express" at the 44th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Society in Tübingen, Germany. The workshop brought - and this book brings - together information-structural and information-theoretic perspectives on optional variation between linguistic encodings. Previously, linguistic phenomena like linearization, the choice between syntactic constructions or the distribution of ellipsis have been investigated from an information-structural or information-theoretic perspective, but the relationship between these approaches remains underexplored.

The goal of this book is to look more in detail into how information structure and information theory contribute to explaining linguistic variation, to what extent they explain different encoding choices and whether they interact in doing so. Using experimental and corpus-based methods, the contributions investigate this on different languages, historical stages and levels of linguistic analysis.

Chapters

  • Information structure and information theory
    A short introduction
    Ingo Reich, Robin Lemke, Lisa Schäfer
    Chapter 1
  • The comprehension of broad focus
    Probing alternatives to verb phrases
    Radim Lacina, Patrick Sturt, Nicole Gotzner
    Chapter 2
  • An information-theoretic account of constituent order in the German middle field
    Katrin Ortmann, Sophia Voigtmann, Stefanie Dipper, Augustin Speyer
    Chapter 3
  • Choosing referential expressions and their order
    Accessibility or Uniform Information Density?
    Yvonne Portele, Markus Bader
    Chapter 4
  • The role of information in modeling German intensifiers
    J. Nathanael Philipp, Michael Richter, Tatjana Scheffler, Roeland van Hout
    Chapter 5
  • Cleft sentences reduce information density in discourse
    Swantje Tönnis
    Chapter 6
  • Tell me something I don’t know
    Speaker salience and style affect comprehenders’ expectations for informativity
    Vilde R. K. Reksnes, Alice Rees, Chris Cummins, Hannah Rode
    Chapter 7
  • Prosodic factors do not always suppress discourse or surprisal factors on word-final syllable duration in German polysyllabic words
    Ivan Yuen, Bistra Andreeva, Omnia Ibrahim, Bernd Möbius
    Chapter 8

Statistics

Information structure and information theory

Biographies

Robin Lemke, Saarland University

Robin Lemke is currently a postdoc at Saarland University, working in the areas of psycholinguistics, syntax and pragmatics. He received his PhD from Saarland University in 2021. His research focuses mostly on how syntactic constraints, processing mechanisms and pragmatic reasoning constrain the form and usage of elliptical expressions

Lisa Schäfer, Saarland University

Lisa Schäfer is a research associate at the Department of German Studies at Saarland University. She currently uses experimental methods to investigate the grammar and usage of ellipsis as well as the comprehension of the generic masculine.

Ingo Reich, Saarland University

Ingo Reich is Full Professor for German Linguistics at Saarland University. His current research focuses on the grammar and use of complex sentences, ellipsis and Easy-to-Read German.

Book cover

Downloads

PDF
Bibliography
Buy from Amazon.de
Buy from Amazon.co.uk
Buy from Amazon.com
Collaborative reading on Paperhive

Published

September 19, 2024
LaTeX source on GitHub

Series

Topics at the Grammar-Discourse Interface

Print ISSN

2567-3335
Cite as
Lemke, Robin, Schäfer, Lisa & Reich, Ingo (eds.). 2024. Information structure and information theory. (Topics at the Grammar-Discourse Interface 10). Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.12784266
Copyright (c) 2024 Robin Lemke, Lisa Schäfer, Ingo Reich; Radim Lacina, Patrick Sturt, Nicole Gotzner, Katrin Ortmann, Sophia Voigtmann, Stefanie Dipper, Augustin Speyer, Yvonne Portele, Markus Bader, J. Nathanael Philipp

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Details about the available publication format: PDF

PDF

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-96110-481-9

doi

10.5281/zenodo.12784266

Details about the available publication format: Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN-13 (15)

978-3-98554-110-2

Physical Dimensions

180mm x 245mm