Organizers:

Caroline Féry, Universität Potsdam
Manfred Krifka, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin & Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS), Berlin

Description:

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).

• 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.

Submission of Abstracts:

An abstract (preferably a pdf file, doc files are also accepted) should be maximally three pages (1200 words) long, including data and references. The abstract should start with the title of the paper, followed by the text of the abstract. Please do not include the author's name in the abstract. On a separate page, please give the author's name, affiliation, e-mail address, telephone number, mailing address, the paper title and the session number(title). The abstract should be sent electronically to both cil18@cil18.org and krifka@rz.hu-berlin.de, with a subject line containing the words CIL18 Information Structure, preferably as a pdf-file.

Important Dates:

• Deadline for Abstract Submission: May 31, 2007
• Notification of Acceptance/Rejection: on or before August 31, 2007