Syntax-prosody Interface for Romanian within Information Structure Theories

The following main ideas have been pointed out and put to work within our paper: (a) Information Structure (IS) theories (topic-focus, theme-rheme, background-contrast, informational and contrastive focus, focus projection rules, etc.) on text are shown to behave currently as a consistent linguistic tool that can stand behind a correct, language and contextual-depending, mapping of text into speech discourse, on the basis of local-global, textual-intonational structures and markers. (b) Functional and logical-semantics (including pragmatics) approaches for IS modelling of the local and global syntax and discourse, coming from the text side, and reliable intonational units within coherent theories on spoken discourse, coming from the prosody side, are needed. We outline here the SCD (Segmentation-Cohesion-Dependency) and FDG (Functional Dependency Grammar) parsing strategies and linguistic theories. (c) Concerning the IS semantics, this paper takes a first (experimental) step to design an adequate syntax-prosody interface for Romanian, by adapting and applying the Prague School’s TFA (Topic-Focus Articulation) algorithm. The contributions we consider worth to be mentioned are: (d1) theoretical and computational local-global parsing frameworks of Romanian, emphasizing the functional and hierarchical organization of linguistic categories and markers: SCD and FDG. (d2) outline of the relationship between textual local-global syntactic-discourse structures and prosodic intonational units; (d3) implementing for the first time (to our knowledge) the TFA algorithm to Romanian.