Information Structure & Peripheries in Zaar

Résumé 0

In this paper analysing peripheries in relation with syntax and information structure in Zaar, a Chadic language spoken in Nigeria, we have argued for a minimal annotation representing in a simple and concise way the interface between information structure and syntax. The article uses the concept of macrosyntax, based on illocutionary units, for this new level of annotation using existing morphosyntactic tiers in Elan. The annotation system has been chosen, and a corresponding set of tags developed, bearing in mind that they should be as theory-neutral as possible in order to implement a genuine bottom-up heuristic methodology. The main asset of this system of annotation lies in the notion of stacks it uses to account for disfluencies, discontinuities and ellipses, and represent the oral discursive flow. With the corresponding annotation script, a pilot 90 min (15,000 words) corpus has been annotated to run a preliminary study of peripheries. We have argued that, although topics and frame-setters share the same intonation pattern, their syntactic properties call for a specific syntactic representation within the frame of Dependency Grammar.