Information Structure and Minimal Recursion Semantics

Comparing English and Finnish, and simplifying a complex issue very much, we can say that English has fixed word order and Finnish has free word order. Syntactic theories such as HPSG (Sag and Wasow, 1999) have provided relatively successful descriptions of English, using a phrase structure approach to capture generalizations about fixed word order. Software tools such as LKB (Copestake, 2000) have been developed and made freely available to provide good support for implementing these descriptions. Free word order in Finnish is described in depth by Vilkuna (1989), both in terms of syntax and its discourse functions. Theories such as HPSG have been much less successful in providing descriptions of languages such as Finnish, where discourse functions play a major role in word order. One of the problems in HPSG is that its account of information structure and discourse functions has not yet been sufficiently developed. This paper1 addresses one aspect of this issue, namely what kind of representation is appropriate for information structure in HPSG. Another paper in this volume (Jokinen, 2005) presents an implementation of Finnish discourse syntax in an HPSG framework using LKB. Sections 26.2 and 26.3 describe two different approaches to representing information structure: a syntax-oriented approach which has been proposed