Discourse Features and Treebanks

Stephen Carlson
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Re: Discourse Features and Treebanks

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Jonathan Robie wrote: May 24th, 2017, 8:52 pm Nice posts! Question: What reference do you recommend for information flow? Is there a good overview articles so I don't have to start another 500 page book?
Perhaps, Wallace Chafe, Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing (U Chicago Press, 1994). And the book is only 300 pages. It's almost a quarter-century old, but Chafe was the pioneer in the field and this is a recapitulation of his thinking.

ETA: As for an article, perhaps Nicolas Bertrand's article in the Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics, "Information Structure and Greek."
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Jonathan Robie
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Re: Discourse Features and Treebanks

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Stephen Carlson wrote: May 26th, 2017, 5:03 am
Jonathan Robie wrote: May 24th, 2017, 8:52 pm Nice posts! Question: What reference do you recommend for information flow? Is there a good overview articles so I don't have to start another 500 page book?
Perhaps, Wallace Chafe, Discourse, Consciousness, and Time: The Flow and Displacement of Conscious Experience in Speaking and Writing (U Chicago Press, 1994). And the book is only 300 pages. It's almost a quarter-century old, but Chafe was the pioneer in the field and this is a recapitulation of his thinking.
By some lucky coincidence, I had ordered that before posting this question, so I seem to have ordered the right one. Used copies are available at very reasonable prices. He seems to have done a lot of work on Seneca at the same reservations where my father did some research, I grew up near these reservations and was on one of them from time to time. So when I saw some things he had written on Seneca, I was interested.
Stephen Carlson wrote: May 26th, 2017, 5:03 am ETA: As for an article, perhaps Nicolas Bertrand's article in the Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics, "Information Structure and Greek."
Thanks!

Maybe I need to read the book before I'll really understand what you are getting at. Here's the kind of thing I'm confused by. Wallace Chafe did seem to acknowledge constituents that had a relationship to each other, e.g. for the sentence my father laughed:

Image

I would have expected constituents to be units that information flow and discourse analysis would work from. I would have expected them to acknowledge the hierarchical relationship among constituents. I'll need to read the book to understand this better.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Jonathan Robie
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Re: Discourse Features and Treebanks

Post by Jonathan Robie »

ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Stephen Carlson
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Joined: May 11th, 2011, 10:51 am
Location: Melbourne
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Re: Discourse Features and Treebanks

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Jonathan Robie wrote: May 27th, 2017, 9:29 am Here's the kind of thing I'm confused by. Wallace Chafe did seem to acknowledge constituents that had a relationship to each other, e.g. for the sentence my father laughed:

Image

I would have expected constituents to be units that information flow and discourse analysis would work from. I would have expected them to acknowledge the hierarchical relationship among constituents. I'll need to read the book to understand this better.
I don't think this page's citation of Chafe (whose title is not given as far as I can tell) has anything to do with information flow. It seems like you're trying to guess at what Chafe is doing based on scattered clues on the internet before having read him.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
Jonathan Robie
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Re: Discourse Features and Treebanks

Post by Jonathan Robie »

Stephen Carlson wrote: May 28th, 2017, 3:20 am I don't think this page's citation of Chafe (whose title is not given as far as I can tell) has anything to do with information flow. It seems like you're trying to guess at what Chafe is doing based on scattered clues on the internet before having read him.
This is Chafe's semantic axes rather than information flow. And yes, I am trying to understand how Chafe relates to constituents while waiting for the book to arrive. I don't know how the two relate.

For what I'm doing now, the main thing is to model constituents correctly at the sentence level, and I will read Chafe's book when it arrives (or at least when I get back into town after it arrives, it seems). But I would assume any model of the meaning of a larger unit would take into account related constituents like the ones in "my father laughed", no?
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Stephen Carlson
Posts: 3351
Joined: May 11th, 2011, 10:51 am
Location: Melbourne
Contact:

Re: Discourse Features and Treebanks

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Jonathan Robie wrote: May 28th, 2017, 4:56 pm For what I'm doing now, the main thing is to model constituents correctly at the sentence level, and I will read Chafe's book when it arrives (or at least when I get back into town after it arrives, it seems). But I would assume any model of the meaning of a larger unit would take into account related constituents like the ones in "my father laughed", no?
Uh, I don't think your expectations are in line with what Chafe's going to deliver. From the above-cited Chafe's book:
Chafe 1994:ix wrote:There are many linguists, for example, who believe that a particularly good way to advance your knowledge is to construct sequences of English words, some of which appear to fit the language better than others, and to attempt to explain these "data" by manipulating abstract constituent structures. That kind of research is foreign to my own experience, and I will have almost nothing to say about it here.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
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