Expanding Topic-Focus Articulation with Boundary and Accent Assignment Rules for Romanian Sentence

The present paper, maintaining the interest for applying Prague School’s Topic-Focus Articulation (TFA) algorithm to Romanian, takes the advantage of an experiment of investigating the intonational focus assignment to the Romanian sentence. Using two lines of research in a previous study, it has been showed that TFA behaves better than an inter-clausal selection procedure for assigning pitch accents to the Background-Kontrast (TopicFocus) entities, while the Inference Boundary algorithm for computing the Theme-Rheme is more reliable and easier extendable towards boundary and contour tone assignment rules, leading to our novel proposal of Sentence Boundary Assignment Rules (SBAR). The main contributions of this paper are: (a) The TFA algorithm applied for Romanian is extended to inter-clause level, and embedded into a discursive approach for computing the BackgroundKontrast entities. (b) Inference Boundary algorithm, applied to Romanian for clause-level Theme-Rheme span computing, is extended with a set of SBAR rules, which are relying on different Communicative Dynamism (CD) degrees of the clause constituents. (c) On each intonational unit, the extended TFA algorithm is further refined, in order to eliminate ambiguities, with a filter derived from Gussenhoven’s SAAR (Sentence Accent Assignment Rule). Remarkably, TFA and CD degrees proved again to be resourceful, especially as technical procedures for a new and systematic development of an Information Structure Discourse Theory (ISDT).