Description
Book SynopsisA text usually provides more information than a random sequence of clauses: It combines sentence-level information to larger units which are glued together by coherence relations that may induce a hierarchical discourse structure. Since linguists have begun to investigate texts as more complex units of linguistic communication, it has been controversially discussed what the appropriate level of analysis of discourse structure ought to be and what the criteria to identify (minimal) discourse units are. Linguistic structure–and more precisely, the extraction and integration of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information–is shown to be at the center of text processing and discourse comprehension. However, its role in the establishment of basic building blocks for a coherent discourse is still a subject of debate. This collection addresses these issues using various methodological approaches. It presents current results in theoretical, diachronic, experimental as well as computational research on structuring information in discourse.
Table of ContentsList of Figures and Tables Notes on Contributors 1 Structuring Information in Discourse: Topics and Methods Israel de la Fuente, Anke Holler and Katja Suckow 2 Coherence and the Interpretation of Personal and Demonstrative Pronouns in German Yvonne Portele and Markus Bader 3 Cleft Focus and Antecedent Accessibility: The Emergence of the Anti-focus Effect Clare Patterson and Claudia Felser 4 Topics and Subjects in German Newspaper Editorials: A Corpus Study Peter Bourgonje and Manfred Stede 5 Inferable and Partitive Indefinites in Topic Position Klaus von Heusinger and Umut Özge 6 Projection to the Speaker: Non-restrictive Relatives Meet Coherence Relations Katja Jasinskaja and Claudia Poschmann 7 Central Adverbial Clauses and the Derivation of Subject-Initial V2 Liliane Haegeman 8 Discourse Conditions on Relative Clauses: A Crosslinguistic and Diachronic Study on the Interaction between Mood, Verb Position and Information Structure Marco Coniglio and Roland Hinterhölzl 9 What’s in an Act? Towards a Functional Discourse Grammar of Platonic Dialogue and a Linguistic Commentary on Plato’s Protagoras Cassandra Freiberg
