PREFACE
Information structure and sentential force have both a long an independent history in linguistic research. Both concepts describe aspects of a sentence that are not captured by syntactic structure alone.
Information structure describes dichotomies into focus and background or theme and rheme as well as into topic and comment (or combinations of these like focus-link-tail). These additional dichotomies are motivated by discourse structure on the one hand and sentence internal structure on the other. E.g., the main sentence accent often indicates the focus, or the new information in a sentence. Thus the focus in a sentence can be understood as the answer of an implicit constituent question.
Sentence force describes the way a syntactically determined sentence type (declarative, interrogative, imperative etc.) is used in a certain communicative context. Again, sentence sentential force does not only depend on syntax but also on additional information such as intonation, temporal and modal anchoring and propositional content.
In recent theories, information structure is investigated with respect to its relation to intonation, its role in the interpretation of focus particles, or its impact on establishing ellipsis. However, there are very few approaches that discuss the interaction of information structure and sentence force. The contributions in this volume focus on the impact of information structure and sentence force.
In his contribution On the interpretation of wh-clauses in exclamative environments, Franz d'Avis evaluates the hypothesis that so called wh-exclamatives in German are of the same semantic type as wh-interrogatives. He discusses two question that concern the status of embedded wh-clauses: First, he asks why certain wh-clauses cannot be embedded under predicates like to wonder but under predicates like to be amazed. This particular distribution holds for wh-clauses with an intensifying element like very inside the clause initial wh-phrase. Second he asks why ob/whether-clauses cannot be embedded under exclamative predicates? He then claims that for root wh-clauses exclaiming is one way to use a wh-clause. The relevant factor for being an exclamative is then the obligatory exclamative accent.
Hans-Martin Gaertner with On the force of V2 declaratives discusses embedded German V2 declaratives that share properties with both subordinate relative clauses and main clauses. He argues that modal subordination failure helps decide between two rivaling accounts for this construction. Thus, a hypotactic analysis involving syntactic variable sharing must be preferred over parataxis plus anaphora resolution. The scopal behavior of the construction will be derived from its "proto-assertional force", which it shares with similar "embedded root" constructions.
Kleanthes Grohmann discusses the minimum distance that an element must cross in order to enter into a well-formed movement dependency. In his contribution Clausal Tripartion, Anti-Locality and Preliminary Considerations of a Formal Approach to Clause Types he develops a theoretical framework which is compatible with recent thoughts on syntactic computation regarding local economy and phrase structure. His approach also agrees with the view that certain pronouns are grammatical formatives, rather than fully lexical expressions. He concludes that if an element does not move a certain distance, the derivation crashes at PF—unless the lower copy is spelled out (as a pronominal element). His framework opens a number of questions for the study of clause-typing.
On the basis of the distribution of term answers in well-formed question/answer sequences Ingo Reich with Question/answer congruence and the semantics of wh-phrases argues that wh-phrases should be analyzed as functional expressions with an indefinite core. Their function being to restrict possible focus/background structures in direct or congruent answers. He then integrates this description into a variant of Schwarzschild's information-theoretical approach to F-marking and accent placement. Finally, he describes the consequences of his approach to the focus/background structure of wh-questions.
This special issue of Theoretical Linguistics comprises a selection of papers that were given at the workshop Information Structure and the Referential Status of Linguistic Expressions during the annual meeting of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (German Society of Linguistics) in Leipzig in February 2001. We also invited one paper (Grohmann) which were presented at the workshop Sentence Type and Specificity at the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft und Typologie (ZAS) in March 2001 in Berlin. A different selection of papers from these two workshops has been published as a special issue "NP-Interpretation and Information Sructure" in the last volume of Theoretical Linguistics (28.2/3):
We specially like to thank the reviewers for their detailed and constructive comments on the first versions of the papers. Special thanks go to Mechthild Bernhard and Paul David Doherty for their helping hand in preparing the contributions for publication. Finally, we like to thank Manfred Krifka for inviting us to this special issue and Ursula Kleinhenz for their constructive, friendly and helpful cooperation on the side of the publishers.
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