Integrating Pragmatics into the Grammar

0 . Introduction In recent years, the number of linguists who refer to notions like focus and ground have grown rapidly. Many interesting articles have appeared that show that we cannot give a complete syntactic, morphological or prosodic analysis without taking such notions into acccount. By the focus of an utterance I understand the new information that the speaker wants to convey. In contrast to the focus, the ground of an utterance corresponds to material that is assumed to be already known to the hearer. Focus and ground are thus defined in terms of what the speaker and hearer of an utterance know and want to achieve with their utterances. In this respect, focus and ground are clearly pragmatic notions since they refer to users of language and particular contexts of use. In this paper I will discuss three types of phenomena which illustrate the need for integrating the pragmatic notions focus-ground with other components of the grammar. I will look at intonation, word order and morphology. However, the point of the paper is not just to argue once more that a proper treatment of these different aspects of the grammar requires access to pragmatic notions. My aim is rather to discuss what principled ways there are to account for the interaction between the 'core' components of grammar such as syntax, morphology and intonation and pragmatic notions such as focus and ground. In order to make the discussion fairly concrete, I will compare two distinct ways of accounting for the grammar-pragmatics interface; one is the derivational approach taken in Government-Binding theory and the Minimalist Program and the other is a constraint-based approach, illustrated by Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, HPSG.