tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "TOWARDS AN AUTOMATIC IDENTIFICATION 0F TOPIC AND FOCUS"

The purpose of the paper is (i) to substantiate the claim that the output of an automatic analysis should represent among other things also the hierarchy of toplc-focus articulation, and (ii) to present a general procedure for determining the toplc-focus articulation in Czech and English. (i) The following requirements on the output of an automatic analysis are significant: (a) in the output of the analysis it should be marked which elements of the analyzed sentence belong to its topic and which to the focus$ (b) the scale of communicative dynamism (CD) should also be identified for every representation. | TOWARDS AN AUTOMATIC IDENTIFICATION OF TOPIC AND FOCUS Eva Hajicova and Petr Sgall Faculty of Mathematics and Physics Charles University Malostranskổ n. 25 118 00 Praha 1 Czechoslovakia ABSTRACT The purpose of the paper Is 1 to substantiate the claim that the output of an automatic analysis should represent among other things also the hierarchy of topic-focus articulation and 11 to present a general procedure for determining the topic-focus articulation In Czech and English. I The following requirements on the output of an automatic analysis are significant a in the output of the analysis it should be marked which elements of the analyzed sentence belong to Its topic and which to the focus b the scale of communicative dynamism CD should also be identified for every representation of a meaning of the analyzed sentence since the degrees of CD correspond to the unmarked distribution of quantifier scopes in the semantic interpretation of the sentence c the analysis should also distinguish topicless sentences from those ha-p-ing a topic which is relevant for the scope of negation. II For an automatic recognition of topic focus and the degrees of CD two points are crucial a either the input language has a considerable degree of the so-called free word order as in Czech Russian or its word order is determined mainly by the grammatical relations as in English French b either the input is spoken discourse and the recognition procedure includes an acoustic analysis or written printed texts are analyzed. In accordance with these points a general procedure for determining topic focus and the degrees of CD Is formulated for Czech and English with some hints how the preceding context can be taken into account. 1. We distinguish between the lẹvel of linguistic meaning de Saussure s and Hjeịmslev s form of content Cosieru_s Bedeutung others literal meaning and its interpretation in the sense of truth-conditional intensional logic see Materna and Sgall 1980 Sgall 1983 . For some .