Workshop on Interface-based Approaches to Information Structure

Thanks a lot to everyone who has participated in the workshop: it was a special event with great presentations and illuminating commentaries, with many interesting ideas and discussions. We cannot replicate the discussions but (at least some) presentations can be found here.

Date: 13 – 15 September 2008
Location: University College London, UK

In this workshop, we were interested in recent developments in information structure, and in particular in approaches that do not necessarily tie pragmatic interpretation to specific syntactic positions. One motivation behind these approaches is the expectation that they may lead to a more constrained syntax. We believe that information structure is a fruitful area to investigate the mapping between syntax and interpretation, as the same discourse notion can be expressed by various means, such as pitch accent, word order, morphological markers and so on. The rich variety in the type of empirical data creates a good testing ground for distinct hypotheses about the mapping.

Each paper was allocated a 30-minute presentation followed by a 15-minute commentary by a designated commentator. Selected papers from the workshop will be considered for peer-reviewed book publication.

The workshop is part of the AHRC-funded project A flexible theory of topic and focus movement and is hosted by UCL Linguistics.

Invited speakers:

Daniel Büring
Gisbert Fanselow
Edwin Williams