The framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) boasts many elegant analyses of syntactic and semantic phenomena. However, little emphasis to date has been placed on syntactic structures when influenced by semantic or pragmatic considerations, such as that of theme and rheme in languages like Russian. Clearly, Russian grammar follows other principles, but the role of contextual inf...

Several studies have investigated the relation between information structure and intonation structure. Few studies however have investigated this relationship empirically using natural face-to-face conversations. The current study explores this relation using a large corpus of face-to-face conversations on a map navigation task. In this task dialogue partners sometimes do and sometimes do not h...

We introduce a modular, dependency-based formalization of Information Structure (IS) based on Steedman’s prosodic account [1, 2]. We state it in terms of Extensible Dependency Grammar (XDG) [3], introducing two new dimensions modeling 1) prosodic structure, and 2) theme/rheme and focus/background partitionings. The approach goes without a non-standard syntactic notion of constituency and can be...

In recent work we have come to challenge assumptions that we shared (Borschev and Partee 1998a) with Babby (1980) concerning the role of Theme-Rheme structure in accounting for the nominative-genitive alternation in negated existential sentences (the NES construction, in the terms of Babby (1980), the classic work which we are building on). The challenge is exemplified most clearly in our “kefi...

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 ac...

In this paper we start from the theory of Functional Sentence Perspective developed primarily by Firbas [1], Svoboda [12] and also later by Sgall et al. [9]. We make an attempt to formulate and implement a procedure for Czech allowing to automatically recognize which sentence constituents carry information that is contextually dependent and thus known to an addressee (theme), constituents conta...

In this paper we present a grammar formalism that combines the insights from Combinatory Categorial Grammar with feature structure unification. We show how information structure can be incorporated with syntactic and semantic representations in a principled way. We focus on the way theme, rheme, and focus are integrated in the compositional semantics, using Discourse Representation Theory as fi...