Information Structure: Notional Distinctions, Ways of Expression

Information Structure, the packaging of information to satisfy the immediate communicative needs, exerts a powerful force on all structural levels of language. We show how this concept can be defined, we argue for focus, givenness, topic, frame setting and delimitation as important subconcepts, and we illustrate the wide variety in which these information structural functions are expressed in languages. 1. What is Information Structure? The phenomena we subsume under the notion of information structure (IS, for short) have enjoyed the attention of linguists for a long time. They have been identified since the medieval Arab grammatical tradition by different linguistic schools in a number of ways. To mention the perhaps most influential one, the Prague School initiated by Mathesius has argued that the identification of given material (the theme) and the highlighting of new material (the rheme) exerts a powerful force on language structure. Today, the effects of IS are recognized in every theoretic framework that strives for a comprehensive view of linguistic structure, and they are investigated in a wide variety of distinct languages – witness the contributions to the Parallel Session on Information Structure at CIL 18. But what is IS? Following Chafe (1976), we understand it to refer to the packaging of information that meets the immediate communicative needs of the interlocutors, i.e. the techniques that optimize the form of the message with the goal that it be well understood by the addressee in the current attentional state. One such feature, for example, is the highlighting of constituents, called focus. In (1), a question creates a particular attentional state, which is recognized by the focus in the answer, expressed by pitch accent on tiger (cf. 1a). Pitch accent on road, as in (1b), would lead to an infelicitous answer, even though the truth conditions of (1a) and (1b) are the same, as it does not fit to the context question. (1) {What did you see on the road?} a. We saw a TIGER on the road. b. #We saw a tiger on the ROAD.