Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics

For many linguists interested in pragmatics, including the Prague School theorists, Halliday (1967), and Vallduví (1992,1993), information structure is a sentence-level structure. It is generally characterized as a variation of sentential structure along certain parameters to modulate the presentation of the information imparted by the sentence in such a way as to relate that information to prior context. The factors in that relationship are characterized in terms of primitive functional roles such as theme/rheme, focus/(back)ground, topic/link, old/new, etc. These primitives and the correlated information structure of sentences are used to explain the roles of intonational focus and of particular syntactic focus constructions, of topicalization and other displacement transformations, and of a fairly wide range of other phenomena, including, e.g., word order in relatively free word order languages such as German, the functions of distinguished structural positions in Catalan or Hungarian, definiteness in Slavic languages, specificity in Turkish, use of specific affixes such as Japanese -wa, etc.