Information Structure in English Nominal Phrases

The purpose of this paper is to show that nominal phrases in English often have an information structure, in much the same way as clauses do. The paper deals only with premodifiers and headwords, putting aside the role of determiners and of postmodifying words and phrases. It uses a distinction made by Halliday (2004), as follows. Information structure exists on two levels: the "system of information," made up of Topic and Comment (which are familiar concepts in the literature), and the "system of theme," made up of Theme and Rheme (which work on a higher level, are less well known, and rely on a potentially confusing use of terms). Information structure is a structure of information; its units may coincide with syntactic units, but need not; and one syntactic structure (such as adjectival or adverbial phrase, subject or object) may represent different information elements on different occasions. For example: