LSA 209: Intonation and meaning

Daniel Büring | session 2 | CANCELLED

This course is about the interaction of pragmatics, prosody and phrase structure. We review classic and current work on the interpretation of focus and related information structure categories such as topic, their representation in the grammar, and their prosodic (and sometimes syntactic) realization. Choices in one of those three areas obviously influence our theories of the other two, so our goal is to develop a comprehensive model of all three (interpretation, representation and realization). In particular, we aim for an integration of semantic theories of information structure with work on prosody, especially metrical structure. After an in depth look at English, we will discuss assorted information structure phenomena in a typologically diverse set of languages.

Reading: Selected materials available online.

Areas of linguistics: Syntax, semantics, and morphology