Information-structural Constraints on PP Topicalization from NPs

In this paper, we discuss PP extraction from complex NPs such as [Aus Tubingen](i) haben [mehrere Studenten t(i)] am Forschungswettbewerb teilge-nommen. (`From Tubingen have several students in the research contest participated'). Extractions from complex NPs are difficult to capture since they are subject to various restrictions related to the syntactic status of the extracted PP, the semantic relation between the verb and the complex NP, and the type of verb involved. In this paper, we will concentrate on one particular kind of extraction, the PP topicalization from NPs. This PP topicalization has been shown to be dependent on an appropriate context. In order to account for the discourse properties of the construction, we present an account based on the Questions under Discussion (QUD) approach to information structure. Modeling QUDs is starting to emerge as a fruitful way to define an explicit hinge between the properties of the sentence and the nature of the discourse in which the sentence can function. The proposed QUD analysis is based on attested data from corpora, which is supplemented by experimental evidence.