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 l...

This paper investigates the influences of three different reading styles ( Lyric, Critical and Explanatory) to the distribution tendency of sentential accents (classified as rhythmic accent and semantic accent). The comparison among multiple styles is performed in three research domains: high-level constructions, low-level phrases and disyllabic prosodic words. One finds that the assignment of ...

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 contr...

In this paper, we give a formal representation of the thematic-rhem~tic (T-II) structure of a n~tnr,'~l language discourse, b~tsed on ~ typed ~-calculus. In this paper, we give a formed representation of the thematie-rhematic ('P-ll) structure of a, nahum] lsLn-triage discourse. Some pairs, triples, or in general n-tuples of sentences in a discourse may differ in the 1)hLee of theh' information...

A topic or a theme is what discourse, a discourse fragment or a sentence is about. It is the shortest summary of a discourse, the main proposition of a paragraph or what is commented on in a sentence. The term topic is usually defined as the aboutness of a unit of discourse [20]. Topic structure within a text can be tackled from two different points of view: from a Document Level (discourse top...

Successful dialogue requires cultivation of common ground (Clark, 1996), shared information, which changes as the conversation proceeds. Dialogue partners can maintain common ground by using different modalities like eye gaze, facial expressions, gesture, content information or intonation. Here, we focus on intonation and investigate how contrast in information structure is prosodically marked ...

Although information structure (information packaging, functional sentence perspective, discourse pragmatics, or informatics) has been studied for many years and from many angles, it remains a subject of great debate. In recent years researchers have fallen into two principal schools of thought. Under the more semantically oriented approach, information structure (IS) categories, such as focus,...

ing If we look at the guides written for abstractors it becomes soon apparent that abstracting is far more than just ‘summarising’. In addition to the distinction between ‘informative’ and ‘indicative’ abstracting mentioned earlier we find a number of specific recommendations and injunctions; to retain the balance and emphases of the original, to pass no comments (either favourable or critical)...

The structure imposed upon spoken sentences by intonation seems frequently to be orthogohal to their traditional surface-syntactic structure. However, the notion of "intonational structure" as formulated by Pierrehumbert, Selkirk, and others, can be subsumed under a rather different notion of syntactic surface structure that emerges from a theory of grammar based on a "Combinatory" extension to...

The role of systemic functional grammar (SFG) is usually investigated in postgraduate courses and in-service programmes with experienced teachers. In contrast, this study examines the impact SFG on student-teachers’ professional development a pre-service second language teacher education programme Argentina. Framed research ecological perspectives, tutor examined perceptions group student-teach...