SFB 632:  Information structure: The Linguisitic Means for Structuring Utterances, Sentences and Texts

• Subject Area: Humanities
• Term: from 2003 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 5485900

The Collaborative Research Centre which has started in July 2003 brings together scientists from the areas of linguistics, psychology and English Studies of the University of Potsdam and linguistics and African Studies of the Humboldt University Berlin. Their common scientific goals are the formulation of integrative models of information structure, the in-depth study of information structure in the various disciplines of linguistics, the better understanding of the embedding of the principles of information structure in human cognition in the areas of language processing and acquisition as well as practical applications for their findings.
We define information structure as the structuring of linguistic information, typically in order to optimise information transfer within discourse. The underlying idea is that the same information needs to be prepared or "packaged" in different ways depending on the background and the goal of the discourse. Three aspects are of particular theoretical interest: first, the interaction of the relevant formal levels (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, the choice of lexical means, the composition of texts); second, the general cognitive processing of information structure; and third, a crosslinguistic typology of information structural devices.
Four research domains are interacting and collaborating with each other. In domain A the centre of attention lies on theoretical questions: phonology, syntax and semantics are represented in their interfaces. Domain B has an empirical and typological orientation. The B projects are anchored in African Studies and Diachronic Linguistics. Domain C studies the cognitive bases of the processing and acquisition of information structure, and domain D offers the typological, computational and phonetic competences necessary for the good functioning of the whole enterprise.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres

Completed projects

• A01 - The Syntactic Expression of Information Structure and the Architecture of Grammar (Project Heads Fanselow, Gisbert ;  Vicente, Luis )
• A02 - Information structure (IS) in non-assertive speech acts (Project Heads Krifka, Manfred ;  Repp, Sophie )
• A03 - Rhetorische Struktur in der gesprochenen Sprache: Die Modellierung globaler prosodischer Parameter (Project Head Mayer, Jörg )
• A04 - Fokusevaluierung, Anaphorizität und Diskurskohärenz (Project Head Beck, Sigrid )
• A05 - Focus realisation, focus interpretation, and focus use from a cross-linguistic perspective (Project Head Zimmermann, Malte )
• A06 - A constraint-based analysis of information structure in German, Spanish and French (Project Head Müller, Stefan )
• A08 - Structuring linguistic information using discourse particles (Project Head Egg, Markus )
• B01 - The interaction of information structure and grammar in Gur and Kwa languages (Project Heads Hartmann, Ph.D., Katharina ;  Krifka, Manfred )
• B02 - Information structuring in the Chadic Languages (Project Head Hartmann, Ph.D., Katharina )
• B04 - The role of information structure in language change (Project Heads Donhauser, Karin ;  Petrova, Svetlana )
• B06 - The Kiezdeutschkorpus. Analyses at the Periphery (Project Head Wiese, Heike )
• B07 - Predicate-centered focus types: A sample-based typological study in African languages (Project Head Güldemann, Tom )
• B08 - Grammatical status and pragmatic function of the Nachfeld (Project Heads Hartmann, Ph.D., Katharina ;  Kleemann-Krämer, Anja Christina )
• B09 - Prosodische Fokusmarkierung in Sprachkontaktsituationen (Project Heads Schroeder, Christoph ;  Zerbian, Sabine )
• B11 - Information Structure and Clause Combining (Project Head Demske, Ulrike )
• C01 - Contextually licensed non-canonical word order in language comprehension (Project Heads Fanselow, Gisbert ;  Kliegl, Ph.D., Reinhold )
• C03 - L1-acquisition of linguistic means for marking information structure: prosodic, syntactic and lexical aspects (Project Heads Adani, Flavia ;  Höhle, Barbara )
• C04 - Prosody and information structure as forms of "input" in second language acquisition (Project Heads Carroll, Susanne E. ;  van de Vijver, Ruben )
• C06 - Experimental and corpus investigations of Information Structure in Hindi (Project Head Vasishth, Shravan )
• C07 - The effect of linguistic and non-linguistic contextual information on the use of information-structural alternatives in language production and language processing (Project Heads Spalek, Katharina ;  Wartenburger, Isabell )
• D02 - Typology of information structure (Project Heads Fanselow, Gisbert ;  Féry, Caroline ;  Zimmermann, Malte )
• D03 - Signalparametrische Ausprägung von Hervorhebung und Gliederung lautsprachlicher Äußerungen im Sprachvergleich (Project Head Pompino-Marschall, Bernd )
• D04 - Methods for interactive linguistic corpus analysis of information structure (Project Head Kuhn, Jonas )
• D05 - Tonal structure and information structure - phonetics and phonology (Project Head Kügler, Frank )
• D06 - Stucturing information in interactive natural language generation (Project Head Koller, Alexander )
• E02 - The Syntactic Expression of Information Structure and the Architecture of Grammar (Project Heads Fanselow, Gisbert ;  Vicente, Luis )
• E03 - A constraint-based analysis of information structure in German, Spanish and French (Project Head Müller, Stefan )
• E04 - L1-acquisition of linguistic means for marking information structure: prosodic, syntactic and lexical aspects (Project Heads Adani, Flavia ;  Höhle, Barbara )
• E05 - The effect of linguistic and non-linguistic contextual information on the use of information-structural alternatives in language production and language processing (Project Heads Spalek, Katharina ;  Wartenburger, Isabell )
• E06 - Grammatical status and pragmatic function of the Nachfeld (Project Head Kleemann-Krämer, Anja Christina )
• INFD01 - Linguistic database for information structure (Project Heads Lüdeling, Anke ;  Stede, Manfred )
• MGK - Integriertes Graduiertenkolleg (Project Heads Wiese, Heike ;  Zimmermann, Malte )
• T01 - Education modules for language variation in urban areas: dialects, multilingualism and the question of 'proper German' (Project Head Wiese, Heike )
• T02 - Information structure in language synthesis (Project Heads Kügler, Frank ;  Stede, Manfred )
• Z - Administration (Project Head Zimmermann, Malte )

• Applicant Institution: Universität Potsdam
• Participating University: Freie Universität Berlin; Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
• Participating Institution: Senatsverwaltung für Bildung, Jugend und Familie
• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Malte Zimmermann