Encoding of Information Structure in German and French
Research team: Uwe Reyle (PI), Arndt Riester (researcher), Ina Rösiger (PhD student), Cristel Portes (Mercator fellow)
Project A6 is developing a joint annotation method for information structure, Questions under Discussion (QUDs) and discourse structure, complementing existing annotation guidelines for coreference and information status that were developed by project A1 in the previous SFB stages.
We provide information-structural analyses of spoken political discourses (in particular, radio interviews) in German, French and English, and a semantic model that integrates the corpus analyses with formal theories of discourse structure.
The corpus analyses will allow us, furthermore, to study and compare the syntactic and prosodic realisation of abstract information-structural categories such as focus, background, aboutness topic, contrastive topic, as well as not-at-issue content in German, French and other languages.
A further interest of project A6 is the adaptation of an existing English coreference resolver (see project A8) to German, with the particular goals to extend the resolver's capabilities by using prosodic cues available in spoken data, and to model coreference resolution, bridging resolution and information-status classification as a joint task.