The paper briefly reviews a theory of intonational prosody and its relation syntax, and to certain oppositions of discourse meaning that have variously been called "topic and comment", "theme and rheme", "given and new", or "presupposition and focus". The theory, which is based on Combinatory Categorial Grammar, is presented in full elsewhere. the present paper examines its consequences for the...

We present a framework for the integrated analysis of the textual and prosodic characteristics of information structure in the Switchboard corpus of conversational English. Information structure describes the availability, organisation and salience of entities in a discourse model. We present standards for the annotation of information status (old, mediated and new), and give guidelines for ann...

The paper briefly reviews a theory of intonational prosody and its relation syntax, and to certain oppositions of discourse meaning that have variously been called "topic and comment", "theme and rheme", "given and new", or "presupposition and focus." The theory, which is based on Combinatory Categorial Grammar, is presented in full elsewhere. The present paper examines its implications for the...

We present an inference-based text understanding methodology for the resolution of functional anaphora in the context of the centering model. A set of heuristic realization constraints is proposed, which incorporate language-independent conceptual criteria (based on the well-formedness and conceptual strength of role chains in a terminological knowledge base) and language-dependent information ...

The concept of theme and rheme we want to propose in this paper is pragmatic in two senses of the wordz the theme/ theme structure (TRS) is viewed as a strategy of communication and thus belongs to pra~natics, and it seems to offer a pragmatic solution for a problem of machine translation. The starting-point of our considerations is defined by several arEuments claiming the ne@essity to preserv...

For many linguists interested in pragmatics, including the Prague School theorists, Halliday (1967), and Vallduví (1992,1993), information structure is a sentence-level structure. It is generally characterized as a variation of sentential structure along certain parameters to modulate the presentation of the information imparted by the sentence in such a way as to relate that information to pri...