This paper presents the development and validation of a new information structure for design methods for an enhanced repository of design methods to support design practice and pedagogy. The structure is based on features derived from challenges faced by design students, practitioners, and educators in understanding, using, and teaching design methods, and it is experimentally validated. Results show 81.2% of participants had no difficulty in understanding and using design methods based on the proposed information structure. Participants reported 8 improvements in the structure.

This study combines corpus-based comparison and open-ended survey data to investigate kinship terminology usage in introductory contexts across languages. Focusing on the expression ‘this/here is my brother’, it examines how speakers of English and Chinese introduce a brother, with particular attention to whether they use a kinship term alone or add an appositive personal name. In addition, an open-ended questionnaire was completed by 119 participants representing 10 language backgrounds. The study further explores the cognitive motivations underlying these cross-linguistic differences in introductory kinship expressions. The results show that: (1) in the corpus data, Chinese speakers tend to introduce their brothers using kinship term alone, whereas English speakers typically include the brother’s personal name; (2) the questionnaire data suggest that many European-language speakers prefer a ‘kinship term + name’ pattern, whereas East Asian-language speakers more often rely on the kinship term alone and (3) these patterns can be interpreted with reference to the Focus-Shift Principle, the Principle of Least Effort and Typological Markedness. Overall, the study extends the English–Chinese corpus comparison to a broader multilingual sample and offers a cognitively informed account of recurring cross-linguistic tendencies in brother-introduction contexts.

Sentences with syntactic movement out of sentential complements of manner-of-speaking (MoS) verbs (e.g. whisper, shout) are degraded in acceptability, an effect called the manner-of-speaking (MoS) island effect. Accounts variably attribute the MoS island effect to the violation of the subjacency condition, to the low frequency of MoS verbs taking sentential complements, or to a general information-structural constraint that discourse-backgrounded constituents cannot be extracted. In five acceptability judgment experiments, we find that the MoS island effect can be modulated by foregrounding or backgrounding the extracted constituent, suggesting a causal relationship between discourse backgroundedness and this effect. Our findings challenge syntactic and frequency accounts of the MoS island effect.

This article introduces a new way to explain how information structure is signaled prosodically in English. I claim that METRICAL STRUCTURE plays a central role (Ladd 2008, Truckenbrodt 1995). Information structure (defined as in Steedman 1991 and Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998) places strong constraints on the PROBABIILISTIC mapping of words onto metrical prosodic structure—that is, foci usually align with nuclear accents and theme/rheme units with prosodic phrases, and themes are less metrically prominent than rhemes. It is shown that focus position, scope, and pragmatic interpretation are then derived by manipulating EXPECTED PROMINENCE within metrical structure. Broadly, the more prominent a word than expected, the more likely a contrastive reading; the less prominent, the more likely a givenness reading. Both constructed and naturally occurring examples from the Switchboard corpus are used.

Suspense is an important aspect of cognitive-emotional narrative text comprehension. We adopt a text-centered, linguistic approach, investigating how the information structure of a narrative text as modeled by its erotetic structure instigates suspense. We report on two studies that reveal a strong correlation between the presence of what we term ‘potentially inquiry-terminating questions’ (PITQs) and the level of experienced suspense. PITQs are binary questions that hold a unique role in the erotetic structure of a narrative: the reader perceives one possible answer to resolve a broader, pivotal plot-related question and the other answer to leave it temporarily unresolved. While previous research has proposed that information structure is a factor in deriving narrative suspense, in this paper, we show that it is the role of PITQs specifically that allows us to effectively predict suspense. Our research shows that PITQs are a linguistic notion that has a clear cognitive-emotional correlate. Thus, PITQs should receive future attention in linguistic theory, pragmatics and interdisciplinary studies. While our approach is specifically concerned with written texts, the flexibility of erotetic theories of interpretation in principle allows us to extend the scope of the present approach to any other medium of narrative presentation.

This article proposes a syntax and a semantics for intonation in English and some related languages. The semantics is ‘surface-compositional’, in the sense that syntactic derivation constructs information-structural logical form monotonically, without rules of structural revision, and without autonomous rules of ‘focus projection’. This is made possible by the generalized notion of syntactic constituency afforded by combinatory categorial grammar (CCG)—in particular, the fact that its rules are restricted to string-adjacent type-driven combination. In this way, the grammar unites intonation structure and information structure with surface-syntactic derivational structure and Montague-style compositional semantics, even when they deviate radically from traditional surface structure.

The article revises and extends earlier CCG-based accounts of intonational semantics, grounding hitherto informal notions like ‘theme’ and ‘rheme’ (a.k.a. ‘topic’ and ‘comment’, ‘presupposition’ and ‘focus’, etc.) and ‘background’ and ‘contrast’ (a.k.a. ‘given’ and ‘new’, ‘focus’, etc.) in a logic of speaker/hearer supposition andupdate, usingaversion of Rooth's alternative semantics. A CCG grammar fragment is defined that constrains language-specific intonation and its interpretation more narrowly than previous attempts.

An analysis of antecedent mismatch effects under ellipsis is proposed to explain why some cases of verb phrase ellipsis exhibit a sizeable penalty when the elided target is not structurally matched to its antecedent, while other cases show little or no penalty at all. The proposal attributes the penalty in the former case to an information-structural constraint governing contrastive topics, and it is argued that previous accounts have misattributed that penalty to a licensing constraint on ellipsis. Results from four experiments (three off-line acceptability, one on-line self-paced reading) confirm that the relative size of the mismatch penalty can be reliably predicted based on the information structure of the clause containing the ellipsis and that acceptability differences associated with information structure are observable even in the absence of ellipsis.

Since Du Bois's (1987b) seminal paper, ergative alignment in morphosyntax has been claimed to correlate with a characteristic constellation of argument realization in discourse: both intransitive subjects (S) and transitive objects (P) serve to introduce new referents via full noun phrases (NPs), while transitive subjects (A) are dispreferred for this function and are thus mostly realized as pronouns or zero (e.g. Dixon 1995, Du Bois et al. 2003, Goldberg 2004). This ergative patterning in discourse is generally accounted for in terms of information-management strategies employed by speakers in dealing with the cognitive demands of introducing and monitoring referents in discourse. These claims have recently been questioned by Everett (2009), whose data (English and Portuguese) show no support for the claimed ergative bias in discourse and raise doubts about explanations in terms of information management. The present article subjects the claims of an ergative bias in discourse to more rigorous testing, drawing on the largest database compiled to date (nineteen spoken-language corpora from fifteen typologically diverse languages), and assesses the explanatory frameworks. We find that, with the exception of Du Bois's original Sakapultek data, there is very little evidence for the postulated ergative pattern in natural spoken-language discourse crosslinguistically. Although our findings do confirm low levels of full NPs in the A role (Du Bois's ‘Non-lexical A’ constraint), we concur with Everett (2009) that the semantic feature [±human] provides an empirically more sound and conceptually more economical account than earlier explanations framed in terms of information management. Finally, we address the plausibility of emergentist claims for a diachronic link between ergative alignment in morphosyntax and information flow in discourse. The raw data used in this article and extensive exemplification of the methodology employed are available as online supplementary materials.

In Japanese linguistics and elsewhere, the particle wa in its thematic use has been widely regarded as a paradigmatic instance of a ‘topic marker’. This work aims to demonstrate that, contrary to this received wisdom, most often thematic wa merely indicates the groundhood (the status as a nonfocus) rather than the topichood (the status as a topic) of the marked constituent, although it serves as a marker of contrastive topic in some configurations. In a root clause, as a rule, an explicit argument must be marked by thematic wa if it (i) is nonfocal and (ii) does not cooccur with an explicit, nonfocal sister argument less oblique than it. This implies that an explicit, nonfocal subject must be wa-marked, given that a subject is by definition the least oblique argument. Arguments marked by thematic wa despite not meeting this condition (e.g. a wa-marked object cooccurring with a wa-marked subject), as well as at least some instances of wa-marked adjuncts, are interpreted as contrastive topics. It is further pointed out, based on corpus data, that it is much more common for wa to indicate mere groundhood than topichood.

This report investigates the uses of the ergative case marker in transitive clauses in Bumthang, a language of Central Bhutan. We discuss the conditions under which the ergative is required and show that a simple analysis involving multiple influences models the data. Previous studies have shown that variable case marking may be determined by syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic factors, but in Bumthang we see that ALL of these factors play a role in determining the use of the ergative case marker. We hope that our analysis will prove useful for understanding the variable uses of the ergative case marker in Himalayan and other languages as well as providing interesting challenges for formal models of case marking.

Although Cherokee is known to show highly flexible clausal word order, the principles that predict speakers' preferences among possible orders are not extensively described. This article presents a new description of the grammatical properties that predict clausal word order in spoken Cherokee, based on a corpus study of word-order variation. Our results show that the placement of nominal expressions relative to verbs, and the relative order of nominal expressions within a clause, are determined in a probabilistic way by the cumulative interaction of several factors: REFERENTIAL ACCESSIBILITY, CONTRAST, AND THEMATIC ROLE. The findings suggest that thematic properties may have a greater word-order role than generally assumed in languages with nonconfigurational and/or polysynthetic properties.

When a language provides multiple syntactic options for conveying the same semantic content, these options generally serve distinct discourse functions. In some cases, however, they serve the same discourse function while being in complementary distribution syntactically. This article argues that in these instances, the syntactic variants constitute Alloforms of a single, more abstract construction. Pairs of such alloforms include inversion and long passives in English and two forms of postposing in Italian. Moreover, English inversion is argued to be an alloform of both preposing and postposing. This account explains the distributional difference between alloforms of a single construction and complex structures built up of multiple distinct constructions. Finally, the report considers the ramifications of this account for linguistic theory in general and the notion of a ‘construction’ in particular.

The received wisdom is that word-order alternations in Slavic languages arise as a direct consequence of word-order-related information-structure constraints such as ‘Place given expressions before new ones’. In this article, we compare the word-order hypothesis with a competing one, according to which word-order alternations arise as a consequence of a prosodic constraint: ‘Avoid stress on given expressions’. Based on novel experimental and modeling data, we conclude that the prosodic hypothesis is more adequate than the word-order hypothesis. Yet we also show that combining the strengths of both hypotheses provides the best fit for the data. Methodologically, our article is based on gradient acceptability judgments and multiple regression, which allows us to evaluate whether violations of generalizations like ‘Given precedes new’ or ‘Given lacks stress’ lead to a consistent decrease in acceptability and to quantify the size of their respective effects. Focusing on the empirical adequacy of such generalizations rather than on specific theoretical implementations also makes it possible to bridge the gap between different linguistic traditions and to directly compare predictions emerging from formal and functional approaches.

We investigate the synchronization of speech and co-speech actions (i.e., manual game moves) in a dyadic game interaction across different levels of information structure and mutual visibility. We analyze cross-modal synchronization as the temporal distance between co-speech actions and corresponding (1) pitch accent peaks and (2) word onsets. For (1), we find no effect of mutual visibility on cross-modal synchronization. However, pitch accent peaks and co-speech actions are more tightly aligned when game moves are prosodically prominent due to information structural needs. This result is in line with a view of a tightly coupled processing of modalities, where prominence-lending modifications in the prosodic structure attract corresponding manual actions to be realized in a way similar to ‘beat’ gestures. For (2), we do find an effect of mutual visibility, under which co-speech actions are produced earlier and more tightly aligned with word onsets. This result is in line with a view in which co-speech actions act as communicative affordances, which may help an early disambiguation of a message, similar to ‘representational’ co-speech gestures.

In this study, we present data from two experiments investigating the effect of prosodic focus marking on German L1 and L2 speakers’ interpretation of pronouns. Experiment 1 tested L2 speakers’ interpretation of personal and demonstrative subject pronouns. Experiment 2 examined L1 and L2 speakers’ interpretation of unaccented and accented personal subject and object pronouns. The results of experiment 1 reveal that L2 speakers are sensitive to the different functions of the two subject pronouns. However, grammatical role and focus marking influenced referential choice to similar degrees for both pronouns, suggesting that L2 speakers’ weighting of these linguistic factors differs from that of L1 speakers. Experiment 2 showed L1 and L2 speakers to prefer the subject referent for both subject and object pronouns. Referent preference reversal is only observed with the accented subject pronoun in L1 speakers. Ultimately, this study emphasizes the varying levels of sensitivity to grammatical role and information structure observed not only for the different pronoun types but also among different speaker groups.