Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-jr42d Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T11:48:43.241Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The information structure of Danish grammar constructions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2009

Patrizia Paggio
Patrizia Paggio*
Affiliation:
Københavns Universitet, Center for Sprogteknologi, Njalsgade 140–142, bygning 25, 2300 Københavns S.Denmarkpaggio@hum.ku.dk
Get access

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of how information structure can be accounted for in a formal grammar of Danish. Three information structure features – topic, focus and background – are discussed, and it is shown how they are instantiated in a number of different grammatical constructions from a corpus of spoken Danish. Prosodic, syntactic and information structure constraints characterising the various constructions are represented as typed feature structures following Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), and the constructions themselves are ordered in a type hierarchy. The proposed approach modifies and extends earlier HPSG-based accounts by integrating information structure as a dimension of phrasal and clausal grammar constructions.

Keywords

Danish grammarfocusinformation structuretopic
Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , June 2009 , pp. 137 - 164
Copyright
Copyright © Nordic Association of Linguistics 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Bresnan, Joan. 1971. Sentence stress and syntactic transformations. Language 47, 257–281.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, Noam. 1971. Deep structure, surface structure and semantic interpretation. In Steinberg, Danny & Jakobovitz, Leon A. (eds.), Semantics: An Interdisciplinary Reader in Philosophy, Linguistics and Psychology, 183–216. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cooper, Robert. 2004. Using type theory with records for HPSG. Presented at Fest Colloquium for Uwe Mönnich, Freudenstadt.Google Scholar
Copestake, Anne, Flickinger, Dan, Pollard, Carl & Sag, Ivan A.. 2005. Minimal Recursion Semantics: An introduction. Research on Language and Computation 3, 281–332. New York: Springer. http://lingo.stanford.edu/sag/papers/copestake.pdf (accessed 3 April 2009).Google Scholar
Dahl, Östen. 1974. Topic–comment structure revisited. In Dahl, Östen (ed.), Topic and Comment, Contextual Boundness and Focus (Papiere Zur Textlinguistik 6), 1–24. Hamburg: Helmut Buske.Google Scholar
Delin, Judy. 1989. Cleft Constructions in Discourse. Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh.Google Scholar
Diderichsen, Paul. 1946. Elementær dansk grammatik. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. [3rd edn. 1962.]Google Scholar
Diderichsen, Philip & Elming, Jakob. 2004. Topik i spontan dansk dialog. Master's thesis, Copenhagen Business School, Institute of Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar
Engdahl, Elisabet & Vallduví, Enric. 1996. Information packaging in HPSG. In Grover, Claire & Vallduví, Enric (eds.), Studies in HPSG (Edinburgh Working Papers in Cognitive Science 12), 1–32. Edinburgh: Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh.Google Scholar
Ericsson, Stina. 2005. Information Enriched Constituents in Dialogue. Ph.D. thesis, University of Gothemburg.Google Scholar
Flickinger, Dan & Bender, Emily M.. 2003. Compositional semantics in a multilingual grammar resource. In Workshop on Ideas and Strategies for Multilingual Grammar Development, 33–42. Vienna: European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information (ESSLLI).Google Scholar
Ginzburg, Jonathan & Sag, Ivan A.. 2000. Interrogative Investigations: Form, Meaning and Use of English Interrogatives. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Grønnum, Nina. 1992. The Groundworks of Danish Intonation. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen.Google Scholar
Grønnum, Nina. 2001. Fonetik og Fonologi: Almen og Dansk. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag.Google Scholar
Grønnum, Nina. 2005. May. DanPASS – Danish phonetically annotated spontaneous speech. Presented at FONETIK 2005, Gothenburg.Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K. 1967. Notes on transitivity and theme in English (part 2). Journal of Linguistics 3, 199–243.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hansen, Erik & Heltoft, Lars. 2000. Grammatik over det danske sprog. Preprint.Google Scholar
Hansen, Erik & Lund, Jørn. 1983. Sæt Tryk På: Syntaktisk tryk i dansk. Copenhagen: Lærerforeningernes Materialeudvalg.Google Scholar
Heltoft, Lars. 1986. The pragmatic syntax of Danish der-constructions. ROLIG-papir 40, 1–23.Google Scholar
Henrichsen, Peter J. 1998. Peeking into the Danish living room: Internet access to a large speech corpus. In NODALIDA 1998, 119. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen.Google Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud. 1991. Dislocation. In Haspelmath, Martin, König, Ekkehard, Osterreicher, Wulf & Raible, Wolfgang (eds.), Language Typology and Language Universals: An International Handbook (vol. 2), 1050–1078. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud & Michaelis, Laura A.. 1998. Sentence accent in information questions: Default and projection. Linguistics and Philosophy 21 (5), 447–544.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lumsden, Michael. 1988. Existential Sentences. Routledge: London.Google Scholar
McNay, Anna. 2005. Information structure, word order, and quantifier scope in German (Technical Report 11). Durham and Newcastle Working Papers in Linguistics 11. http://www.clp.ox.ac.uk/pages/ANNAMCNAY/durhamarticle.pdf (accessed 3 April 2009).Google Scholar
Mikkelsen, Line. 2004. Specifying Who: On the Structure, Meaning, and Use of Specificational Copular Clauses. Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Santa Cruz.Google Scholar
Milsark, Gary. 1974. Existential Sentences in English. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Neville, Anne & Paggio, Patrizia. 2001. Developing a Danish grammar in the GRASP project: A construction-based approach to topology and extraction in Danish. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science 53, 1–13.Google Scholar
Nølke, Henning. 1984. Clefting in Danish? NyS 14, 72–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paggio, Patrizia, Diderichsen, Philip & Elming, Jakob. 2004. The information structure of Danish constructions. Abstracts of the Third International Conference on Constructional Grammar, 81. University of Provence.Google Scholar
Pollard, Carl & Sag, Ivan A.. 1994. Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen F. 1999. How not to mark topics: ‘Topicalization’ in English and Yiddish. In Texas Linguistics Forum. Austin, TX: University of Texas.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech, Geoffrey & Svartvik, Jan. 1995. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Rochemont, Michael S. 1989. Implementing Focus in Machine Translation (Eurotra-D Working Papers 9). Saarbrücken: IAI/Eurotra-D.Google Scholar
Sag, Ivan A. 2001. Aspects of a theory of grammatical constructions. Presented at the First International Construction Grammar Conference, Berkeley, CA.Google Scholar
Selkirk, Elisabeth. 1984. Phonology and Syntax: The Relation between Sound and Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Thomsen, Ole N. 1998. Syntactic processing and word order in Danish. In Engberg-Pedersen, Elisabeth & Harder, Peter (eds.), Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 30, 129–166.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Togeby, Ole. 1992. PRAXT: Pragmatisk tekstteori. Århus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag.Google Scholar
Togeby, Ole. 2003. Fungerer denne sætning? Funktionel dansk sproglære. Copenhagen: Gads Forlag.Google Scholar
Vallduví, Enric & Engdahl, Elisabet. 1996. The linguistic realisation of information packaging. Linguistics 34, 459–519.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilcock, Graham. 2005. Information structure and minimal recursion semantics. In Arppe, Antti, Carlson, Lauri, Lindén, Krister, Piitulainen, Jussi, Suominen, Mickael, Vainio, Martti, Westerlund, Hanna & Yli-Jyrä, Anssi (eds.), Inquiries into Words, Constraints and Contexts: Festschrift for Kimmo Koskenniemi on his 60th Birthday (CSLI Studies in Computational Linguistics Online), 268–277. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Yoshimoto, Kei, Kobayashi, Masahiro, Nakamura, Hiroaki & Mori, Yoshiki. 2005. Processing of information structure and floating quantifiers in Japanese. In Yabushita, Katsuhiko (ed.), 2nd International Workshop of Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics (LENLS 2005), Kitakyushu, Japan, 37–49.Google Scholar