How Do We Signal What's Important When We Talk? Information Structure
How do we focus on crucial information in our conversations? What methods do we have for moving things into the center of discussion? In this week's episode, we talk about information structure: how we build up the common ground in discussion, what we do to bring up topics and signal our focus, and how different languages use varying strategies to bring new ideas to the fore.
This is Topic #75!
This week's tag language: Lingala!
Related episodes:
The Rules of Conversation - Gricean Maxims: • Pragmatics and Gricean Maxims
Building Common Ground - • How Do We Create a Shared World in Convers...
Last episode:
Why Can't Any Go Just Anywhere? NPIs: • Why Can't "Any" Go Just Anywhere? NPIs
Other of our semantics and pragmatics videos:
Sheepish Semantics: The Lambda Calculus - • How Can One Greek Letter Help Us Understan...
Operation Relevance: Relevance Theory - • How Do We Decide What's Relevant in Our Co...
Quantifying Sets and Toasters: Generalized Quantifiers - • What Does "Most" Even Mean? Generalized Qu...
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Sources:
A couple of papers:
Krifka (2006): http://amor.cms.hu-berlin.de/~h2816i3...
Féry and Krifka: http://amor.cms.hu-berlin.de/~h2816i3...
Some slides and notes:
From Andrew McIntyre: https://www.angl.hu-berlin.de/departm...
From Richard Xiao: http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/xiao...
From Kordula De Kuthy and Arndt Riester: http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~kdk/...
From Frank Kügler: http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~kuegl...
Also, the Wikipedia pages for these topics are pretty good:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_(...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_a...
See you all in two weeks!