Information packaging revisited
Petr Kuboň · Library and Archives Canada (Government of Canada) · 1999
Informational partition, i.e., the partition of a sentence into given and new information, has been studied extensively in the literature, but no account has succeeded in formulating a formal theory of the matter, amenable to computational implementation. Arguably, the information-packaging theory of Enric Vallduví has been the most promising. In his account the informational partition of a sentence is interpreted as an instruction to the hearers as to how their respective knowledge stores should be updated with the information carried by the sentence. This gives a precise, concrete meaning to the notions of given and new information. Although Vallduví’s approach represents an important step forward for theories of informational partition, it still has several drawbacks which reduce its overall impact. This dissertation identifies these drawbacks and addresses them in a constructive manner. First, Vallduví argues that the interpretation of informational partition requires that the hearer’s knowledge store be organized in a specific way, as a file in the sense of Heim. I show that this conclusion is unwarranted and propose a more general theory of informational