ESSLLI 2004 - The 16th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information

The interaction between syntax, information structure, and intonation has become one of the hot spots in theoretical and computational linguistic research. There is a growing awareness that empirically adequate linguistic analyses require all three modules of linguistic representation to be expressed in an architecture supporting constraints within and across the modules. And results of this linguistic research have started to inform computational work, e.g. on the generation of contextually appropriate intonation and syntax in dialog systems.

The course introduces and compares current approaches to the syntax information structure interface in three formal linguistic frameworks: Lexical-Functional Grammar (Choi, Holloway-King), Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Engdahl/Vallduví, De Kuthy), and Combinatory Categorial Grammar (Steedman). After an introduction to the idea of information-packaging, the course turns to case studies highlighting how syntactic, pragmatic, and intonational constraints are expressed in the different approaches, and how their interaction is captured.

The following is an overview of the topics that will be discussed in the course, the publications which the individual lectures will be based on, and some additional reading material.

• Lecture 1: "Introduction: Information Structure and What It's Good For."

Handout (4-up version of the slides)

Reading included in the reader:


• Ivana Kruijff-Korbayova and Mark Steedman (2003). Discourse and Information Structure. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 12. 249-259.

Additional reading:


• Klaus von Heusinger (1999). Intonation and Information Structure. The Representation of Focus in Phonology and Semantics. Habilitationssschrift, Universität Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany.
• Lecture 2: "Approaches in Lexical-Functional Grammar"

Handout (4-up version of the slides)

Reading included in the reader:


• Hye-Won Choi (1997): Information Structure, Phrase Structure, and Their Interface. Proceedings of the LFG'97 Conference. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
• Tracy Holloway King (1997): Focus Domains and Information Structure. Proceedings of the LFG'97 Conference. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
• Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King (1996). Structural Topic and Focus Without Movement. In Proceedings of the LFG'96 Conference. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
• Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King (1997). Null Elements in Discourse Structure. In K. V. Subbarao (ed.) Papers from the NULLS Seminar. Delhi: Motilal Banarasidas
• Lecture 3: "Approaches in Categorial Grammar (an related work)"

Handout (4-up version of the slides)

Reading included in the reader:

• Mark Steedman (2000): ``Information Structure and the Syntax-Phonology Interface''. Linguistic Inquiry 31 (4). 649-689.

Additional reading:


• Baldridge, Jason and Geert-Jan Kruijff (2002). Coupling CCG with Hybrid Logic Dependency Semantics. In Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-02). Philadelphia, PA.
• Kruijff, Geert-Jan and Jason Baldridge (2004). Generalizing Dimensionality in Combinatory Categorial Grammar. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-04). Geneva.
• Kruijff, Geert-Jan M. (2001). A Categorial-Modal Architecture of Informativity: Dependency Grammar Logic and Information Structure. Ph.D. thesis, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic.
• Lecture 4: "Approaches in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar"

Handout (4-up version of the slides)

Reading included in the reader:

• Elisabet Engdahl (1999). Integrating Pragmatics into the Grammar. In Lunella Mereu (ed.) Boundaries of Morphology and Syntax. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 175-194.
• Kordula De Kuthy (2002). Discontinuous NPs in German. A Case Study of the Interaction of Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Chapter 6.6.
• Kordula De Kuthy and Walt Detmar Meurers (2003). The Secret Life of Focus Exponents, and What It Tells Us about Fronted Verbal Projections. In Proceedings of the Tenth Int. Conference on HPSG. pp. 97-110. CSLI Publications.
• Lecture 5: "Comparing, Evaluating, and Where Do We Go From Here?"

Handout (4-up version of the slides)

Reading included in the reader:

• Steve Pulman (1997), ``Higher Order Unification and the Interpretation of Focus''. Linguistics and Philosophy 20. 73-115. Pages 73-87.

Course reader: We are grateful to the authors and the publishers CSLI Publications, John Benjamins Publishing, Kluwer Academic Publishers, and the Massachussets Institute of Technology Press for their kind permission to reprint the publications for the course reader free of charge. For copyright reasons the reader will only be available in print at ESSLLI, i.e., not electronically.

Web page: Thanks to Geert-Jan Kruijff for creating his course page Multi-modal combinatory categorial grammar, on which our page is partly modeled.