DGfS 2017 AG 2 "Information structuring in discourse"

Information structuring in discourse

Workshop Section at the 39th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS)

Organizers: Anke Holler, Katja Suckow, Barbara Hemforth, Israel de la Fuente

March 8th - 10th, 2017, Universität des Saarlandes Saarbrücken


Although the need to model the relation between linguistic features of utterances and discourse structure is commonly acknowledged (cf. [2],[1],[3], among others), there is still much debate about what ought to be the appropriate level of analysis of discourse segmentation and what the criteria to identify units of discourse structure are. In previous research, it has been suggested that discourse structure might be defined either in terms of communicative intention, attention, topic structure,speech acts, coherence relations, cohesive devices, or others. Related to this, it is still under discussion whether intonational phrases, syntactic clauses or semantic events/propositions form appropriate building blocks for recognizing units of discourse structure. In addition, there is no consensus whether discourse segments can be recursively embedded or not. On the other hand, discourse units have also been utilized to explain processing preferences observed in different empirical domains such as anaphora resolution, clause combining, grounding, etc. These issues are of interest from a theoretical as well as a processing perspective.

The aim of this working section is to bring together researchers from the broad field of discourse segmentation to discuss information structuring during discourse processing. We particularly welcome contributions (in English or German) from researchers who theoretically focus on models of discourse representation, or from experimentalists who investigate the interplay of linguistic cues and discourse segmentation to model processing preferences using different experimental methods. We are also interested in contributions which approach the topic cross-linguistically, historically or from a computational perspective.


Invited Speakers:

Nicholas Asher (Université Paul Sabatier Toulouse)
Hannah Rohde (University of Edinburgh)

Programm:
Mittwoch, 08.03.2017

13:45 – 14:15 Arndt Riester, Lisa Brunetti & Kordula De Kuthy
Principles of information-structure and discourse-structure analysis
14:15 – 14:45 Jet Hoek, Jacqueline Evers-Vermeul & Ted J.M. Sanders
Complete and independent? Reconsidering discourse segmentation basics
14:45 – 15:45 Markus Bader
From syntactic structure to discourse structure and back again: The role of referential form
15:45 – 16:30 Kaffeepause
16:30 – 17:00 Daniel Altshuler & Dag Haug
The semantics of provisional, temporal anaphors and cataphors
17:00 – 17:30 Sophia Döring
Modal Particles and their Influence on Discourse Structure
17:30 – 18:00 Manfred Stede
Segmentation and Topic Annotation of German Newspaper Editorials

Donnerstag, 09.03.2017

09:00 – 09:30 Ciro Greco & Liliane Haegeman
Discourse Frame setters and the syntax of subject-initial V2 in Standard Dutch and West Flemish
09:30 – 10:00 Rosemarie Lühr
Zum Ausdruck von (non-)at-issueness in alten Sprachen
10:00 – 10:30 Cassandra Freiberg
Identifying Basic Units of Discourse Structure in Corpus Languages: The Case of Ancient Greek
10:30 – 11:15 Kaffeepause
11:15 – 11:45 Marco Coniglio, Roland Hinterhölzl
Discourse structure of relative constructions: a crosslinguistic and diachronic study on the interaction between mood, syntax and event structure
11:45 – 12:15 Claudia Poschmann
Embedded NRRCs and Discourse Structure
12:15 – 12:45 Clare Patterson & Claudia Felser
Cleft focus and accessibility: Online vs. offline differences
12:45 – 13:45 Mittagspause
13:45 – 14:45 Hannah Rohde
Small building blocks, multiple threads, and large repercussions

Freitag, 10.03.2017

11:30 – 12:00 Sofiana Chiriacescu
Script knowledge on information structuring. Evidence from a multi-sentence story-continuation task on Romanian
12:00 – 12:30 Merel Scholman & Vera Demberg
The influence of context on the interpretation of the segments in a discourse relation
12:30 – 13:00 Umut Özge & Klaus von Heusinger
AInferrable and partitive indefinites in topic position
13:00 – 13:30 Tommaso Raso, Maryualê Malvessi Mittmann, & Frederico Amorim Cavalcante
A Cross-Linguistic study on Topic within the framework of the Language into Act Theory
13:30 – 14:00 Matthijs Westera
How the symmetry problem solves the symmetry problem

Alternate speakers

Markus Bader & Yvonne Portele
German pronouns in discourse: Information structure versus surface properties

Jennifer S. Cole & Stefan Baumann
Accounting for context and variability in a prominence-based model of discourse meaning

References
[1] Asher, Nicholas and Alex Lascarides (2003). Logics of Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[2] Grosz, Barbara J. and Candace L. Sidner (1986). Attention, intention, and the structure of discourse. Computational Linguistics 12(3). 175-204.
[3] Kehler, Andrew, Laura Kertz, Hannah Rohde, and Jeffrey L. Elman (2008). Coherence and coreference revisited. Journal of Semantics 25(1). 1-44.