Information structure

In linguistics, information structure describes the way in which information is formally packaged within a sentence. This generally includes only those aspects of information that “respond to the temporary state of the addressee’s mind”, and excludes other aspects of linguistic information such as references to background (encyclopedic/common) knowledge, choice of style, politeness, and so forth.

The basic notions of information structure are focus, givenness, and topic, as well as their complementary notions of background, newness, and comment respectively.Focus “indicates the presence of alternatives that are relevant for the interpretation of linguistic expressions”, givenness indicates that “the denotation of an expression is present” in the immediate context of the utterance, and topic is “the entity that a speaker identifies, about which then information, the comment, is given”. Additional notions in information structure may include contrast and exhaustivity, but there is no general agreement in the linguistic literature about extensions of the basic three notions. There are many different approaches, such as generative or functional architectures, to information structure.

Information structure can be realized through a wide variety of linguistic mechanisms. In the spoken form of English Language, one of the primary methods of indicating information structure is through intonation, whereby pitch is modified from some default pattern. Other languages use syntactic mechanisms like dislocation, anaphora, and gapping; morphological mechanisms like specialized focus or topic-marking affixes; and specialized discourse particles. English in fact uses more than intonation for expressing information structure, so that clefts are used for exhaustive focus, and grammatical particles like only also induce contrastive focus readings.

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