The information structure of Danish grammar constructions

Abstract

This paper addresses the issue of how information structure can be accounted for in a formal grammar of Danish. Three information structure features – topic, focus and background – are discussed, and it is shown how they are instantiated in a number of different grammatical constructions from a corpus of spoken Danish. Prosodic, syntactic and information structure constraints characterising the various constructions are represented as typed feature structures following Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), and the constructions themselves are ordered in a type hierarchy. The proposed approach modifies and extends earlier HPSG-based accounts by integrating information structure as a dimension of phrasal and clausal grammar constructions.