On the theory of presentation

The aim of the paper is to introduce a new information-structural category presentation and to argue for its relevance and independence from other information-structural layers. It is shown that a successful presentation consists of two steps, namely the import of a new discourse participant and its establishing (process) in the ongoing context. The employment of import and process is a coherence strategy that involves at least two sentences. Therefore, these presentational notions must be distinguished from merely intrasentential information structure concepts such as topic, focus, contrast, theme, rheme, etc. The paper also discusses some morphological and syntactic reflections of presentation. Notably, it will be claimed that both non-given (i.e., rhematic) and given (i.e., thematic) information can be (re-) presented. Moreover, the autonomy of the import-process layer from other information-structural concepts will be supported theoretically. 1 Information Structure: Syntax and Pragmatics Throughout the last decade, much attention has been paid to the investigation of information-structural features, such as topic, focus, theme, rheme, contrast, etc. Moreover, at least since Rizzi’s (1997) theoretical proposal, numerous attempts have been made to integrate such features into core syntax. The aim of this paper is to revisit and discuss some of these informational features, both from a syntactic and pragmatic view. In particular, it will be argued that there is a demand for a model that consists of at least four different layers of information structure, i.e., a new layer called presentation will be introduced. In order to facilitate the ensuing discussion, a short survey on both sides of information structure – syntax and pragmatics – will be given in this introductory section. The goal of the syntactic investigation of information structure has been to prove that categories such a focus, topic, contrast, etc. have a more or less severe impact on word order. These claims have been extended from discourseconfigurational languages such as Hungarian (cf. Brody 1995, É. Kiss 1998), Finnish (Molnár & Järventausta 2003) or Basque (Arregi 2002) to IndoEuropean languages as well (e.g., Rizzi 1997 for Italian; É. Kiss 1998, Meinunger 1998, den Dikken 2005 for English; Frey 2004a, 2004b for German and many others). Traditionally, the main interest has been on the so-called left periphery. Especially for the features topic, focus and contrast, there have been attempts to create specific functional categories within the initial sentence domain. An item carrying one of these features has been claimed to raise to the relevant position to check its feature, according to (earlier) minimalist assumptions (Chomsky 1995). The evidence for such functional positions in