Anita Steube - Böcker

The first volume of the series is devoted to the subjects "information structure" and "contrast". The working hypothesis is that, apart from the use of lexical indication, the expression of contrast vs. correction is primarily carried by the intonation contour as a means for indicating scope and focus in negating constructions. The papers in this volume proceed from the premise that the information structure is preformed conceptually, and on articulation in the dynamic context is then portioned and linearized, mapped onto the syntactic representation via the semantic representation, and finally realized intonationally. The findings are partly based on neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic experiments.

The volume demonstrates the interdependence of man’s language capacity and his other conceptual capacities. This enables linguistic structures to be minimalised, and for extra-linguistic domains to provide much of the interpretations of sound and meaning. Underspecification is demonstrated in the word formation of Indo-European, Late Archaic Chinese and modern Khmer; on the word- and sentence levels by the event structures of German; and in the information structure predominantly of languages with the so-called free word order: German, Slavic languages, Arabic compared with English and the tone language Hausa. The volume is noteworthy due to the close cooperation between theoretical and experimental research. Within grammar, it has especially strengthened prosodic research and the syntax-phonology interrelations and their interpretations, and it has helped to create data bases for the relations within texts and to evaluate the findings.