Testing Focus and Non-at-issue Frameworks with a Question-under-Discussion-Annotated Corpus

Abstract

We present an annotated corpus of German driving reports for the analysis of Question-under-Discussion (QUD) based information structural distinctions. Since QUDs can hardly be defined in advance for providing a corresponding tagset, several theoretical issues arise concerning the scope and quality of the corpus and the development of an appropriate annotation tool for creating the corpus. We developed the corpus for testing the adequacy of QUD-based pragmatic frameworks of information structure. First analyses of the annotated information structures show that focus-related meaning aspects are essentially confirmed, indicating a sufficent accuracy of the annotations. Assumptions on non-at-issueness expressed by non-restrictive relative clauses made in the literature seem to be too strong, given the corpus data.

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