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Information Structure in Lesser-described Languages: Studies in prosody and syntax
Edited by Evangelia Adamou, Katharina Haude and Martine Vanhove
[Studies in Language Companion Series 199] 2018
► pp. 403–444

Chapter 14
Annotation guidelines for Questions under Discussion and information structure

| Universität Stuttgart
| Université Paris Diderot and CNRS
| Universität Tübingen

We present a detailed manual for a pragmatic, i.e. meaning-based, method for the information-structural analysis of naturally attested data, which is built on the idea that for any assertion contained in a text (or transcript of spoken discourse) there is an implicit Question under Discussion (QUD) that determines which parts of the assertion are focused or backgrounded (and which ones are not at issue, i.e. not part of the assertion at all). We formulate a number of constraints, which allow the analyst/annotator to derive QUDs from the previous or upcoming discourse context, and demonstrate the method using corpus examples (of French, German, and English). Since we avoid making reference to language-specific morphosyntactic or prosodic properties, we claim that our method is also cross-linguistically applicable beyond our example languages.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Information structure
    • 1.2Discourse structure and Questions under Discussion (QUDs)
    • 1.3Universality of information-structural notions
    • 1.4Corpus resources and a prospect for the study of lesser-described languages
  • 2.Preliminaries for the reconstruction of QUDs (and the creation of discourse trees)
    • 2.1Understanding the text
    • 2.2Preparing the text
  • 3.Formulating Questions under Discussion
  • 4.Adding information-structural markup
  • 5.QUDs and information structure in parallel structures
    • 5.1Parallel structures with a single variable
    • 5.2Parallel structures with two variables: Contrastive topic + focus
    • 5.3Embedded focus
  • 6.Non-at-issue material
  • 7.Conditionals
  • 8.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 2 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.199.14rie
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