Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics

Information Structure of Sentences and Discourse Structure

Informační struktura věty a výstavba diskurzu

 

Some questions about your language

• Do the jokes in your mother tongue have a specific word order?
• Which part of a sentence in your language expresses the most important information?
• Do you make mistakes in foreign languages because you suppose there should be the same inferences from the context as in your language?
• Is it always possible to say clearly where the pronouns refer to? You_i never know, you_i? know…
• Do you know that unlike in English, you are not supposed to go anywhere when they ask you in Czech Chceš_ACTOR=i přinést_ACTOR≠i pivo?
• Are there any typical words in your language you start your answer to an unexpected question with?
• Do the politicians in your country join sentences in a linguistically weird way when they don’t want to speak directly and clearly?

Aims of the course

These are some of the questions we will deal with in our lecture. This course provides a basic information about the text structure beyond syntax: information structure, coreference and bridging anaphora and discourse relations. Its orientation is linguistic: we want you to work with real texts and your knowledge of different languages and to realize how the language means function.

We cordially welcome Czech and foreign students from MFF as well as from other faculties. The more languages, the better.

The course is held in English, unless it is attended by Czech and Slovak students only. Nevertheless, Czech and Slovak students are strongly encouraged to visit the course even if they feel their English is not strong enough.

Structure of the course

Three thematic blocks will be held: information structure, coreference and bridging anaphora, discourse.  

The blocks cover the following topics:

1. Information structure:

• introduction of a new element on the scene, presentation of a new phenomenon; ascription of a quality to a (known) phenomenon
• topic and focus; objective and subjective ordering of topic and focus
• interplay between syntactic structure and information structure
• communicative dynamism and systemic ordering
• focalizers
• information structure in the Functional Generative Description and in the Prague Dependency Treebank

2. Coreference and bridging anaphora:

• grammatical and textual coreference
• anaphora, cataphora, deixis, ellipsis
• types of reference
• recognizing bridging anaphora
• formal means of coreference in different languages
• coreference and bridging anaphora in the Prague Dependency Treebank

3. Discourse structure

• semantic relations in discourse
• primary and secondary discourse connectives; discourse markers
• interplay and discrepancies between syntactic structure and discourse structure
• inferences and implicitness in discourse
• discourse structure in the Lexical Tree-Adjoining Grammar (Penn Discourse Treebank) and in the family of the Prague Dependency Treebanks

 

Requirements

• A small presentation in each of the blocks (information structure, coreference and bridging anaphora, discourse) based on the topic / type of texts / language(s) of your interest
• Active participation in the lessons including short home preparations
• Max. three absences are acceptable.

 

References

1. General information

Zikánová, Šárka et al. 2015. Discourse and Coherence. From the Sentence Structure to Relations in Text. Prague: ÚFAL, MFF UK.

Halliday, M. A. K., & Hassan, R. 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman.

Mikulová, Marie et al. 2006. Annotation on the tectogrammatical layer in the Prague Dependency Treebank. Prague: Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, ÚFAL. doc/manuals/en/t-layer/pdf/t-man-en.pdf

 

Hrbáček, Josef. Nárys textové syntaxe spisovné češtiny. Praha: Trizonia, 1994.

Panevová, Jarmila. Formy a funkce ve stavbě české věty. Praha: Academia, 1980.

Mikulová, Marie a kol. Anotace na tektogramatické rovině Pražského závislostního korpusu: Anotátorská příručka, I, II. Technická zpráva ÚFAL TR-2005-28. Praha: Universitas Carolina Pragensis, 2005. Díl I, s. 538–539; díl II, s. 1096–1118. https://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/pdt2.0/doc/manuals/cz/t-layer/pdf/t-man-cz.pdf

Zikánová, Šárka – Poláková, Lucie – Jínová, Pavlína – Nedoluzhko, Anna – Rysová, Magdaléna – Mírovský, Jiří – Hajičová, Eva. 2015. Zachycení výstavby textu v Pražském závislostním korpusu. Slovo a slovesnost, 76, s. 163–197.

 

2. Information structure

Hajičová, Eva - Partee, Barbara H. - Sgall, Petr. 1988. Topic-Focus Articulation, Tripartite Structures, and Semantic Content. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Firbas, Jan. 1992. Functional Sentence Perspective in Written and Spoken Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Encyklopedický slovník češtiny. 2002. Praha: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny. Heslo Funkční perspektiva větná, Aktuální členění větné.

Mathesius, Vilém. 1947. O tak zvaném aktuálním členění větném. In V. Matheius, Čeština a obecný jazykozpyt. Praha: Melantrich, s. 234–242.

Sgall, Petr – Hajičová, Eva – Buráňová, Eva. 1980. Aktuální členění věty v češtině. Praha: Academia.

Daneš, František. O identifikaci známé (kontextově zapojené) informace v textu. Slovo a slovesnost, 1979, roč. 40, s. 257–270.

Aristoteles. Hermeneutica. Kap. 1–4.

Štěpánková, Barbora. 2014. Aktualizátory ve výstavbě textu, zejména z pohledu aktuálního členění. Praha: Univerzita Karlova v Praze, Matematicko-fyzikální fakulta, ÚFAL.

Encyklopedický slovník češtiny. Praha: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2002. Heslo Rematizace, Rematizátor.

 

3. Coreference and bridging anaphora

Clark, Herbert H. Bridging. In Proceedings of the 1975 workshop on Theoretical issues in natural language processing, June 10–13, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1977.

Recasens, M., Martí, M. and Orasan, C. (2012) Annotating Near-Identity from Coreference Disagreements. In Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12). Istanbul, Turkey, pp. 165–172.

Recasens, M., Hovy, E., Martí, M. (2010). A Typology of Near-Identity Relations for Coreference (NIDENT). . In Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation  LREC.

Recasens, Marta – Martí, Antonia – Taulé, Mariona. Text as Scene: Discourse Deixis and Bridging Relations. 2007. Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural. Sevilla, Spain, 39, pp. 205–212.

Nedoluzhko, Anna. 2013. Generic noun phrases and annotation of coreference and bridging relations in the Prague Dependency Treebank . LAW-VII, ACL 2013.

Schwarz-Friesel, M. 2007. Indirect anaphora in text: A cognitive account. In M. Schwarz-Friesel, M. Consten, & M. Knees (Eds.), Anaphors in Text. Cognitive, formal and applied approaches to anaphoric reference, pp. 3–20. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

 

Nedoluzhko, Anna. 2011. Rozšířená textová koreference a asociační anafora. Koncepce anotace českých dat v Pražském závislostním korpusu. Praha, ÚFAL.

Adamec, Přemysl. 1980. K vyjadřování referenční určenosti v češtině a ruštině. Slovo a

slovesnost, roč. 41.

Štícha, Franišek. 1999. K deikticko-anaforickým funkcím lexému ten. Slovo a slovesnost,

roč. 60, s. 123–135.

Uhlířová, Ludmila. Určenost nominální skupiny. In Běličová, Helena – Uhlířová, Ludmila. Slovanská věta. Praha: Euroslavica, 1996, s. 225–249.

Hlavsa, Zdeněk. 1972. K protikladu určenosti v češtinĕ. Slovo a slovesnost, roč. 33, s. 199–203.

 

4. Discourse relations

Prasad, Rashmi, Dinesh, Nikhil, Lee, Nikhil, Miltsakaki, Eleni, Robaldo, Livio, Joshi, Aravind, and Webber, Bonnie. 2008. The Penn Discourse Treebank 2.0. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008), Marrakech, Moricci

Poláková, Lucie et al. 2012. Manual for annotation of discourse relations in the Prague Dependency Treebank. http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/techrep/tr47.pdf

Publications of the ÚFAL discourse team members, e.g. on http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/discourse/publications.php#discourse

 

Mladová, Lucie et al. (2010). Diskurzní vztahy v češtině a jejich zachycení v Pražském závislostním korpusu. http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/techrep/tr40.pdf

Zikánová, Šárka. 2021. Implicitní diskurzní vztahy v češtině. Praha: Univerzita Karlova, MFF, ÚFAL.