Information Structure in Interaction, Grammar, and Typology

Instructors: Pavel Ozerov

Information Structure is concerned with how speakers adjust their message to the context and to its assumed representation in the interlocutors’ minds. In prevalent frameworks, sentence-level information is partitioned into uncontroversial (“presupposition”) and updating (“focus”) parts, and a referent is selected as an interpretation pivot (“topic”). This model is generally regarded as representing universal properties of discourse and language processing, which are reflected in grammar through “topic” and “focus” marking structures. Recent developments have cast doubts on these assumptions and the categories of topic and focus, which are never marked systematically and are notoriously difficult to “correctly” identify cross-linguistically. Instead, we take a bottom-up usage-based approach to Information Management. In particular, two types of novel linguistic data have propelled this line of research: (i) in-depth studies on markers of Information Structure in typologically diverse languages and (ii) natural multimodal interaction. New cross-linguistic research reveals a panoply of pragmatic-semantic categories which take part in the information management process. Studies of natural interaction analyze in detail the process of incremental, locally monitored structuring of information and attention-alignment. In combination, those studies have begun to reveal how these phenomena – and relevant language-specific markers – epiphenomenally produce vague interpretive effects that are traditionally associated with such notions as topic, presupposition, focus, or contrast. As a result, the emerging framework takes usage data seriously in order to produce richer cross-linguistic and pragmatic analyses, while offering a more parsimonious model with no top-down postulation of cognitive or pragmatic universals. Following an introduction to notions of Information Structure and methods of Interactional Linguistics, we will explore the diversity of factors involved in the interactional process of Information Management, including the opportunity to practice the analysis on students’ own data. The class is aimed at students interested in pragmatics, semantics, language documentation and description, and spoken language.

Keywords: Information Structure, Interaction, Language Documentation and Description, Pragmatics, Morphosyntax, Typology

Instructors

Pavel Ozerov

University of Innsbruck

Pavel Ozerov is a professor of General Linguistics at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. He specializes in the intersection of pragmatics, Interactional Linguistics, information structuring, multimodality, and syntax in typologically diverse languages (especially Trans-Himalayan and Semitic). To this end, he has developed methods and corpora for the study of pragmatics in naturally occurring multimodal speech. In addition, he works on the documentation and description of Trans-Himalayan languages of the Indo-Burmese border, with a project on grammar of the Anal Naga language of India. Dr. Ozerov received his PhD for a study of Information Structure in colloquial Burmese (La Trobe University, 2015), developing the multifactorial information management approach to the study of Information Structure. Afterwards, he held postdoctoral positions of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation at the University of Cologne and of Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Before joining the University of Innsbruck in 2023, he served as an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Münster, Germany.