Textbook in PDF format

This volume results from the workshop ”Discourse obligates — How and why discourse limits the way we express what we express” at the 44th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Society in Tübingen, Germany. The workshop brought — and this book brings — together information-structural and information-theoretic perspectives on optional variation between linguistic encodings. Previously, linguistic phenomena like linearization, the choice between syntactic constructions or the distribution of ellipsis have been investigated from an information-structural or information-theoretic perspective, but the relationship between these approaches remains underexplored.
The goal of this book is to look more in detail into how information structure and information theory contribute to explaining linguistic variation, to what extent they explain different encoding choices and whether they interact in doing so. Using experimental and corpus-based methods, the contributions investigate this on different languages, historical stages and levels of linguistic analysis.
Ingo Reich, Robin Lemke, Lisa Schäfer. Information structure and information theory: A short introduction.
Radim Lacina, Patrick Sturt, Nicole Gotzner. The comprehension of broad focus: Probing alternatives to verb phrases.
Katrin Ortmann, Sophia Voigtmann, Stefanie Dipper, Augustin Speyer. An information-theoretic account of constituent order in the German middle field.
Yvonne Portele, Markus Bader. Choosing referential expressions and their order: Accessibility or Uniform Information Density?
J. Nathanael Philipp, Michael Richter, Tatjana Scheffler, Roeland van Hout. The role of information in modeling German intensifiers.
Swantje Tönnis. Cleft sentences reduce information density in discourse.
Vilde R. S. Reksnes, Alice Rees, Chris Cummins, Hannah Rohde. Tell me something I don’t know: Speaker salience and style affect comprehenders’ expectations for informativity.
Ivan Yuen, Bistra Andreeva, Omnia Ibrahim, Bernd Möbius. Prosodic factors do not always suppress discourse or surprisal factors on word-final syllable duration in German polysyllabic words.
Index