Information Structure

Information structure relates to a range of phenomena that refer to the organization of linguistically encoded information in ways that facilitate an efficient information transfer in an ever-changing communicative context.

The information structure phenomena are reflected in formal features of language, such as prosodic and morphological markings, word order, and other syntactic transformations, such as cleft sentences. While the formal expressions of information structure vary across languages due to the differences in grammatical systems, they are organized along several dimensions that are believed to be universal. These dimensions include focus-background, topic-comment, and given-new and constitute information structure categories, some of which are described in this entry.

The focus-background dimension indicates the existence of alternatives relevant for the interpretation of linguistic expressions for focus and the lack of such alternatives for background. This function of focus is evident in question–answer pairs, such as the one shown in (1).

In this context, the question assumes a number of alternative propositions (e.g., “Mary,” “Peter”), while the answer picks out one of them. The inherent presence of those alternative propositions in the question is signaled in the answer by means of focus in the answer signals. The way focus is expressed varies both cross-linguistically and within the language. Different markings of focus may be related to its specific functions in regard to the expression of alternatives. For instance, the expression of focus via cleft sentences, such as in (2), is related to the exhaustive interpretation. This type of focus indicates that no other alternative is stronger than the one denoted by focus (i.e., nobody else but John paid the bill).

Another marking of focus is associated with semantic operators, such as particles, that may express different relations between the denotation and its alternatives. The focus denotation realized with the means of exclusive particles (e.g., only) expresses that it is the only true assertion among the alternatives that are to be excluded. In contrast, scalar particles (e.g., even) establish a comparison between the alternatives where the focus constituent is expressed as the extreme element. The complex behavior of these and other focus-sensitive expressions (e.g., additives, intensifiers, particularizers) has been accounted for by [Page 909]various theoretical approaches to focus, including alternative semantics, assertion-based theory, givenness theory, and structured meaning theory.

Another important dimension of information structure is givenness, which deals with whether or not something being referred to is in the immediate linguistic context. Most languages have grammatical devices to mark givenness status, which may involve pronominal forms, (in)definite articles, or clitics. For instance, pronouns signal that their referents are given in the context, sometimes even in the same sentence (e.g., Johnj thinks that hej can cook well). An indefinite article, by contrast, indicates that a denotation is not given in the same linguistic context and that it is the first mention of this denotation (e.g., John took a pan from the cupboard). The use of an indefinite article here settles that a definite article would be used when the denotation “pan” is brought back up (e.g., He put some butter in the pan). In addition to these grammatical (anaphoric) devices, givenness status may also be marked through word order or deaccentuation. As suggested above, focus and givenness are in interaction with each other in the sense that focused elements are often not given yet given denotations can also be in focus.

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