What’s the point? The role of punctuation in realising information structure in written English

If we focus on ‘relevance’, the textual metafunction creates relevance by adding prominence through assigning relative value to parts of the clause (Matthiessen 1992). The Theme, for instance, functions to select meaning(s) from the clause (Hannay & Martínez Caro, 2008) and to assign them thematic prominence, which has consequences for the thematic development of the text (Fries, 1992) in contrast to meanings in Rheme. At the same time, New Information functions to highlight specific meanings, to direct the listener’s or reader’s attention to those meanings enabling them to be newsworthy (Fries, 2002), in contrast to ‘Given’ non-newsworthy meanings. Importantly, assigning relevance through thematic and informational prominence contributes to the construal of the co-text and context of the text. It is only through the dual processes of positioning experiential and interpersonal meanings in relation to context and giving them relative value that experiential and interpersonal meanings can operate in text. We can propose, then, that the textual metafunction instantiates experiential and interpersonal meanings. As discourse progresses, the system of INFORMATION structures (i.e. divides or organises) discourse into units, and New information functions to allow the speaker to choose meanings within the unit of information (that may or may not be presented as referentially new to the discourse) to be highlighted as newsworthy within the flow of discourse. We can now characterise New information as the contextually-related selection of one part of a message for the purpose of speaker-directed focus, adding the value of prominence through the naturally corresponding realisation of prominence by the tonic foot in speech in English. The problem with this description, however, is that it can only account for speech. A corresponding description of INFORMATION STRUCTURE in written English is required. Information structure and written English There are significant difficulties involved in identifying the written equivalent of spoken INFORMATION STRUCTURE in English, largely because intonation is not realised in written English. It may seem natural to assume that we can apply the same model of information structure from spoken to written English. After all, anything that is written down can be spoken aloud, and so reading a sentence aloud should reveal its information structure. This is the approach taken by Davies (1989) in explaining the role of prosody in written language. In various empirical studies, Davies (e.g. 1994a, b) has demonstrated that most readers assign the same prosody to text revealing an apparently ‘inherent’ information structure. Where there is variation in assigning the tonic foot, this is often explained by contextual factors. For instance, a pupil and an experienced teacher, when Moore Functional Linguistics (2016) 3:6 Page 7 of 23