Discourse and Information Structure

In addition to deciding what to say, s p e a k ers must decide how t o s a y it. The central premise of studies on the relationship between syntax and discourse function is that a speaker's use of a particular structural option is constrained by s p e-ciic aspects of the context of utterance. Work in discourse has uncovered a variety of speciic discourse functions served by individual syntactic constructions. 1 More recently, in Birner & Ward 1998 we examine generalizations that apply across constructions, identifying ways in which a given functional principle is variously realized in similar but distinct constructions. 1 We use the term`construction' in the conventional sense, to refer to each of the various grammatical conngurations of constituents within a particular language. See Fillmore 1988, Prince 1994, and Goldberg 1995, inter alia, for alternative views of what constitutes a linguistic construction.