On the Linearity of Information Structure

The Information-structural (IS) notions of Focus, Ground and Givenness determine constituent order in a variety of languages, and there is an apparent preference for Given or Grounded elements to precede Focused elements, except perhaps in cases of contrastive Focus. Using the terminology of Kiss (1998, 2007), “information focus” tends to occur at the right edge of a clause. Distinct syntactic operations are responsible for this linear order effect, and thus a single elegant syntactic explanation for these cross-linguistic facts is elusive. This paper suggests that this phenomenon is a long-term product of pressure to choose syntactic variants that have a particular linear order effect. Such a pressure could arise from processing and planning effects, though other factors are likely involved as well. I argue for the plausibility of this account by defending three premises: 1) right-edge Focus can facilitate processing and planning in cases where the Focus of a sentence is new information, 2) right-edge Focus variants will become preferred in usage, 3) usage preferences can affect language change. But first, I review some data which illustrate the problem. First, it has been argued that scrambling often has the effect of placing Focus at the right edge. Focused elements themselves typically only scramble when they are contrastively interpreted. This is shown in Dutch in (1). Also, Yiddish object shift has been analyzed as a form of scrambling and shows the same Given-before-Focus effect, shown in (2).