Work

Annotation guidelines for Questions under Discussion and information structure

Year: 2018

Type: book-chapter

Abstract: 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.

Source: Studies in language companion series

DOI: 10.1075/slcs.199.14rie

Authors: Arndt Riester, Lisa Brunetti, Kordula De Kuthy

Institutions: University of Stuttgart, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle, Université Paris Diderot, University of Tübingen

Language: English

Topic: Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

Subfield: Language and Linguistics

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funder: Agence Nationale de la Recherche

Award: Empirical Foundations of Linguistics : data, methods, models