ODG – Salle du Conseil (533)
9:30-10:15 Etienne Riou et Barbara Hemforth (LLF)
Partially ordered set relations and left-dislocation in French
10:15-11:00 Sophie Prévost et Frédérique Becquet (Lattice)
Initial elements : combinations and preferential sequences in a corpus of scientific articles
11:00-12:00 Arndt Riester (Uni Stuttgart)
Analysis of Discourse Structure and Information Structure using Questions under Discussion
Abstract : I present a pilot study demonstrating the use of implicit Questions under Discussion (Klein & von Stutterheim 1987, Van Kuppevelt 1995, Ginzburg 1995, Roberts 1996) for the joint analysis of spoken or written discourse in terms of discourse structure and information structure. Assuming that (rational) speakers / writers follow strategies to break down complex questions / issues into simpler subquestions, the annotator's task is to recover this strategy by transforming a written text or transcript into a discourse tree in which terminal nodes represent assertions (in their linear order) and non-terminal nodes represent (typically implicit) questions. Contra Roberts (1996), I assume that a subquestion in the tree need not necessarily stand in an entailment relation with its parent question but subquestions must at least depend anaphorically on previous material in order to ensure discourse coherence. Furthermore, the focus on implicit QUDs rather than discourse relations sets the approach apart from theories of discourse structure such as Mann & Thompson (1988) or Asher & Lascarides (2003). The benefit of determining discourse structure in terms of QUDs is twofold. On the one hand, it provides us with a guidance for identifying parallel structures in text (sequences of partial answers to the same QUD), whose information-structural relevance has been shown by Büring (2003). On the other hand, implicit questions enable us to determine focus (and other information-structurally relevant) constituents in the ongoing discourse. On the basis of a transcribed section from an English-language TV interview, I give a walkthrough of the current state of the analysis procedure. The potential cross-linguistic applicability of the approach will be presented on the basis of a French sample text.