Towards a Definition of Focus and Topic

Sgall, Petr

doi:10.1075/llsee.9.14sga

Cited by 14 publications

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“…The appurtenance of an item to the Topic or Focus of the sentence is then derived on the basis of the features cb or nb assigned to individual nodes of the tree (see Sgall 1979):…”

Section: Information Structure In An Annotated Corpusmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…e.g. Sgall 1967;1979;Sgall, Hajičová and Panevová 1986) called Topic-Focus Articulation (TFA) is based on the "aboutness" relation: the Focus of the sentence says something ABOUT its Topic. This dichotomy is based on the primary notion of contextual boundness (see below, Section 3) and its representation is a part of the representation of the sentence on its underlying (deep, tectogrammatical) syntactic level, which is assumed to be a linguistically structured level of meaning.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Plea for Information Structure as a Part of Meaning Representation

Hajičová¹

2019

Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations

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The view that the representation of information structure (IS) should be a part of (any type of) representation of meaning is based on the fact that IS is a semantically relevant phenomenon (Sect. 2.1). In the contribution, three arguments supporting this view are briefly summarized, namely, the relation of IS to the interpretation of negation and presupposition (Sect. 2.2), the relevance of IS to the understanding of discourse connectivity and for the establishment and interpretation of coreference relations (Sect. 2.3). A possible integration of the description of the main ingredients of IS into a meaning representation is illustrated in Section 3.

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“…The appurtenance of an item to the Topic or Focus of the sentence is then derived on the basis of the features cb or nb assigned to individual nodes of the tree (see Sgall 1979):…”

Section: Information Structure In An Annotated Corpusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Plea for Information Structure as a Part of Meaning Representation

Hajičová¹

2019

Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations

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“…For a formal specification see Sgall, 1979; Brought to you by | University of Queensland -UQ Library Authenticated Download Date | 6/19/15 5:56 AM…”

Section: 3mentioning

confidence: 99%

Discussions and Expositions

1983

Theoretical Linguistics

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For many linguists, and particularly theoretical linguists, linguistic progress is like a modern conquest of a territory: The researchers are the soldiers in the most advanced frontline, and all researchers together build a continuous line. There are no "gaps" in the "frontline" of the discipline and the territory which has been conquered earlier is of no interest; the adventures lie ahead.This picture changes radically, when the history of scientific conquest is studied more carefully. In this light the process looks rather like an old fashioned kind of war: One proceeds from battle field to battle field. No battle is really decisive. After having fought a while on a battle field one simply leaves it -most of the time without having attained the aim of the battle on this field -to meet again elsewhere on another field. It is even worse: There is no common strategy; there are many groups fighting on different battle fields and they have no real intention to meet and to join forces.To switch from metaphor to direct expression: Most of the main problems of linguistics have not really been solved. They have been attacked from time to time, have become uninteresting, rediscovered, again attacked and so forth. In order to come to a better organization it is absolutely necessary to study and to classify the problems and this must be based on studies of the history and geography of research.It was one of the basic experiences on the 9th international conference on computational linguistics in Prague in 1982 to mark new battle fields, one Brought to you by |

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“…For concise surveys see, for example, Firbas (1974); Sgall andHajicovS (1977-1978); Sgall and Danes (1978). Because of the subsequent developments, it is difficult to evaluate Mathesius' work in isolation.…”

Section: (A): 272)mentioning

confidence: 99%