Invited Talk: A Note on the relationship of discourse structure to information structure

Although it is generally accepted that a sentences information structure (IS) is determined by its relationship to previous text, the question of how to establish the appropriate discourse context for IS assignment is never raised. Analyses of IS normally assume that that sentence is a question and the target sentence is the answer to that question [1]. The assumption is always that the prior context for a target sentence is the immediatly preceding sentence. While this assumption may be a convenient convention for investigating the subtler aspects of intrasential IS, serious problems arise in analyzing actual texts when the critical context for assigning IS is not part of the immediately preceding sentence. For these cases, it is necessary to have a theory of how discourse structure (DS) constrains the choice of possible contexts for determinining sentential IS. This note addresses how discourse structure and information structure (IS) are related and sketches an integrated approach to the phenomena of discourse continuity. In brief, our claim is that DS constrains the set of possible constituents in a discourse that can provide the relevant context for structuring information in a target sentence, while IS critically constrains DS ambiguity. To develop an argument