Prominence and information structure (C01)

• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2017 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 281511265

This project aims at gaining a better understanding of the relation between prominence and information structure, investigating in a multidimensional approach syntactic and semantic/pragmatic prominence-lending features. First, we study prominent syntactic positions (left and right periphery, clefts, postverbal subject position) in spontaneous dialogue data from various languages, and analyse their role as structural attractors for information-structural units. Second, we study the competition among prominent entities for topic status based on an annotation task and an elicitation experiment, in order to carve out the role of prominence-lending semantic features of subcategorised arguments.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1252: Prominence in Language
• Applicant Institution: Universität zu Köln
• Project Head: Professor Dr. Aria Adli