A modular account of Information Structure in Extensible Dependency Grammar

Abstract

We introduce a modular, dependency-based formalization of Information Structure (IS) based on Steedman's prosodic account, We state it in terms of Extensible Dependency Grammar (XDG), introducing two new dimensions modeling 1) prosodie structure, and 2) theme/rheme and focus/background partitionings. The approach goes without a non-standard syntactic notion of constituency and can be straightforwardly extended to model interactions between IS and other dimensions such as word order. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.