Open AccessInformation structure as parallel tree building
Author(s) -
Jon Stevens
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
proceedings of the international conference on head-driven phrase structure grammar
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1535-1793
DOI - 10.21248/hpsg.2011.21
Subject(s) - computer science , interpretation (philosophy) , pragmatics , tree (set theory) , semantic interpretation , set (abstract data type) , natural language processing , grammar , simplicity , artificial intelligence , semantics (computer science) , theoretical computer science , linguistics , mathematics , programming language , mathematical analysis , philosophy , epistemology
This paper presents a Synchronous Tree Adjoining Grammar (STAG) account of Information Structure,whereby Givenness-marking requires a link between nodes on a syntactic tree and LF nodes whoseinterpretation is supplied by a contextually determined set of Given semantic objects. Byhypothesis, the interpretation of linked nodes bypasses a default interpretation principle thatrequires pragmatic reasoning to disambiguate elements and enrich semantic material. Thus,interpreting Given elements requires less cognitive effort than Focused elements. This, combinedwith some established insights from Game-theoretic pragmatics, yields empirical advantages overmore traditional semantic/pragmatic analyses of equal simplicity.