How Much Belongs in the Grammar? Information Structure and Referential Givenness/newness

This paper is concerned with such concepts as `topic`, `focus` and `cognitive status of discourse referents’, which have been included under the label ‘information structure’, as they relate in some sense to the distribution of given and new information. It addresses the question of which information structural properties are best accounted for by grammatical constraints and which can be attributed to non-linguistic constraints on the way information is processed and communicated. Two logically independent senses of given-new information are distinguished, one referential and the other relational. I argue that some phenomena pertaining to each of these senses must be accounted for in the grammar, while others are pragmatic effects that do not have to be represented in the grammar, since they result from interaction of the language system with general pragmatic principles that constrain inferential processes involved in language production and understanding.