Open Access

Felix Bildhauer

• This is a study of how aspects of information structure can be captured within a formal grammar of Spanish, couched in the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG, Pollard and Sag 1994). While a large number of morphological, syntactic and semantic aspects in a variety of languages have been successfully analysed in this theory, information structure has not been paid the same attention in the HPSG literature. However, as a theory of signs, HPSG should include all levels of description without which the structural descriptions offered by the grammar would ultimately remain incomplete. Languages often explicitly mark the information-structural partitioning of utterances. Depending on the particular language, linguistic resources used for this purpose include prosody (stress/intonation), syntax (e. g. constituent order, special syntactic constructions) and morphology (e. g. special affixes). In HPSG, phonological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic information is represented in parallel, which would seem to be a well-suited architecture for modelling the sort of interfaces called for.