Week 7: Information Structure

Information structure (IS) is construed broadly here as comprising structural and semantic properties of utterances relating to the discourse status of their content, the actual and attributed attentional states of the discourse participants, and the participants’ prior and changing attitudes (knowledge, beliefs, intentions, expectations, etc.). This broad view of IS is meant to subsume notions like

  • focus,
  • presupposition,
  • given vs. new,
  • theme vs. rheme and the various dichotomies such as
  • topic vs. comment or focus,
  • ground or background vs. focus etc

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