On Information Structure, Meaning and Form

Over the past four decades, the syntactic and prosodic properties reflecting the information packaging of a particular sentence have attracted considerable attention in the field. Most linguists working in the generative framework will agree that there are language-specific phenomena concerning information structuring, such as focus, topic and intonation, and that they can only be adequately described with reference to a specific theoretical framework, or model of grammar. However, they will disagree on exactly how this grammatical model must be conceptualized in order to derive the relevant syntactic form with the appropriate intonation and the intended semantic and pragmatic meaning. This book takes up the issue of how the grammar of human language should be modeled to account for linguistic information packaging and interrelated issues such as word order variation and speech act type. The fundamental issue it addresses is the interaction between the linguistic form of information structuring and its interpretation across languages. The term Information Structure (IS) of a sentence refers since Halliday (1967) to the linguistic encoding of notions such as focus versus background and topic versus comment, which are used to describe the information flow with respect to discourse-givenness and states of activation. Examples (1B1-B5) below each provide the same constituent as the foregrounded information, despite certain variations with respect to word order, particles, length, or elaboration. Foregrounded, or focused, constituents are often prosodically highlighted, as signaled by capitalization from now on.