GoingToMeet

Information Structure has been an increasingly lively research area in linguistics in recent years, an area for which approaches from different subfields of linguistics and different theoretical perspectives have been developed. It is understood as the structuring of information that responds to the immediate communicative needs of the interlocutors. This includes at least the following distinct types of structure:

* topic (the entity or set the utterance is about) vs. comment;
* focus (the part of an utterance or utterance meaning that is highlighted) vs. background, where a number of different uses of highlighting might be distinguished, like contrastive, corrective, or information focus as in answers to constituent questions;
* old information (parts of utterances that refer to semantic entities that have been mentioned before and are supposed to be present in the attention of the addressee) vs. new information;
* frame setting (delimiting the extend to which an utterance holds).

The workshop expects contributions concerning these information structuring devices with regards to:

* their expression in languages in prosody and writing, in morphology and syntax;
* their use in communication, e.g. in the answering of questions, in expressing contrasts, or in marking parallel structures;
* their use in contexts other than pure information structuring, e.g. the truth-conditional impact of topics, givenness, or focus, e.g. with focus-sensitive particles;
* their relevance for linguistic theory in general.