How much is too much?

The one-new-idea constraint and related phenomena at the information-intonation interface

Uta Reinöhl’s Emmy Noether Group on “Non-hierarchicality across languages and categories” is pleased to announce the following workshop, which is also the final workshop of our research project:

This workshop assembles researching the packaging of information relative to intonation units. Seminal studies including Chafe (1979, 1994), Givón (1983), and Pawley & Syder (1983) have suggested universal cognitive constraints on how much new information may be expressed in a prosodic chunk, e.g. Chafe’s “one new idea constraint”. Despite their wide-reaching implications, and their impact on fields including discourse analysis, psycholinguistics, and typology, these claims still largely await testing for more languages as well as discourse types.

Invited speakers include Stefan Schnell (Zurich), Pavel Ozerov (Vienna) and Maya Inbar (Jerusalem).

Time and place: The *workshop will take place on Friday, July 12th*, starting approx. at 9:30am and ending with a joint workshop dinner (location and time tba). The location is in HS 1034 in this building (Kollegiengebäude 1). More information can be found on our website.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch either with Naomi Peck (naomi.peck@linguistik.uni-freiburg.de) or Uta Reinöhl (uta.reinoehl@linguistik.uni-freiburg.de)