linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

, information structure, also called information packaging, describes the way in which

information Information is an Abstraction, abstract concept that refers to something which has the power Communication, to inform. At the most fundamental level, it pertains to the Interpretation (philosophy), interpretation (perhaps Interpretation (log ...

is formally packaged within a sentence.Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. ''Information structure and sentence form.'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 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 Politeness is the practical application of good manners or etiquette so as not to offend others and to put them at ease. It is a culturally defined phenomenon, and therefore what is considered polite in one culture can sometimes be quite rude or ...

, and so forth. For example, the difference between an active clause (e.g., ''the police want him'') and a corresponding passive (e.g., ''he is wanted by police'') is a syntactic difference, but one motivated by information structuring considerations. Other structures motivated by information structure include preposing (e.g., ''that one I don't like'') and inversion (e.g., ''"the end", said the man''). The basic notions of information structure are

focus Focus (: foci or focuses) may refer to: Arts * Focus or Focus Festival, former name of the Adelaide Fringe arts festival in East Australia Film *Focus (2001 film), ''Focus'' (2001 film), a 2001 film based on the Arthur Miller novel *Focus (2015 ...

, 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

cognitive Cognition is the "mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, ...

, generative or functional architectures, to information structure. The concept has also been used in studies measuring information density in

cognitive linguistics Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from cognitive science, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are cons ...

Terminology

The term is due to Halliday (1967). In 1976, Chafe introduced the term .

Mechanisms in various languages

Information structure can be realized through a wide variety of linguistic mechanisms. In the spoken form of

English Language English is a West Germanic language that developed in early medieval England and has since become a English as a lingua franca, global lingua franca. The namesake of the language is the Angles (tribe), Angles, one of the Germanic peoples th ...

, 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 In materials science, a dislocation or Taylor's dislocation is a linear crystallographic defect or irregularity within a crystal structure that contains an abrupt change in the arrangement of atoms. The movement of dislocations allow atoms to sli ...

, anaphora, and

gapping In linguistics, gapping is a type of ellipsis that occurs in the non-initial conjuncts of coordinate structures. Gapping usually elides minimally a finite verb and further any non-finite verbs that are present. This material is "gapped" from the n ...

; morphological mechanisms like specialized focus or topic-marking

affix In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. The main two categories are Morphological derivation, derivational and inflectional affixes. Derivational affixes, such as ''un-'', ''-ation' ...

es; and specialized

discourse particle A discourse marker is a word or a phrase that plays a role in managing the flow and structure of discourse. Since their main function is at the level of discourse (sequences of utterances) rather than at the level of utterances or sentences, discou ...

s. Cross-linguistically, word order variation (the so-called " inverted sentences") is one of the main syntactic devices used to convey specific information structure configurations, namely the presentational focus. English in fact uses more than intonation for expressing information structure, so that clefts are used for exhaustive focus, and

grammatical particle In grammar, the term ''particle'' ( abbreviated ) has a traditional meaning, as a part of speech that cannot be inflected, and a modern meaning, as a function word (functor) associated with another word or phrase in order to impart meaning. Alth ...

s like ''only'' also induce contrastive focus readings. Cross-linguistically, there are clear tendencies that relate notions of information structure to particular linguistic phenomena. For instance, focus tends to be prosodically prominent, and there do not seem to be any languages that express focus by deaccenting or destressing. The following German sentences exhibit three different kinds of syntactic 'fronting' that correlate with topic. : a. _Diesen Mann_ habe ich noch nie gesehen. : 'This man have I not yet seen.' (''movement'') : b. _Diesen Mann_, den habe ich noch nie gesehen. : 'This man, that I have not yet seen.' (''left dislocation'') : c. _Diesen Mann_, ich habe ihn noch nie gesehen. : 'This man, I have not yet seen him.' (''hanging topic'') It is often assumed that answers to questions are focused elements. Question and answer pairs are often used as diagnostics for focus, as in the following English examples. :Q: What did John do with the book yesterday? :A: He SOLD the book yesterday. :A: *He sold the book YESTERDAY. :Q: When did Jane sell the book? :A: She sold the book YESTERDAY. :A: *She SOLD the book yesterday.

Concepts

Focus and background

''Focus'' is a grammatical category or attribute that determines indicating that part of an utterance contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive information. Some theories (in line with work by Mats Rooth) link focus to the presence of ''alternatives'' (see ). An alternative theory of focus would account for the stress pattern in the example from the previous section (When did Jane sell the book? She sold the book YESTERDAY), saying that YESTERDAY receives focus because it could be substituted with alternative time periods (TODAY or LAST WEEK) and still serve to answer the question the first speaker asked. ''Background'' is a more difficult concept to define; it's not simply the complement of focus. Daniel P. Hole gives the following framework: "'Focus' is a relational notion, and the entity a focus relates to is called its background, or presupposition."

Topic and comment

The ''topic'' (or theme) of a sentence is what is being talked about, and the ''comment'' (or rheme, or sometimes focus) is what is being said about the topic. That the information structure of a clause is divided in this way is generally agreed on, but the boundary between topic/theme depends on grammatical theory. Topic is grammaticalized in languages like Japanese and Korean, which have a designated topic-marker morpheme affixed to the topic. Some diagnostics have been proposed for languages that lack grammatical topic-markers, like English; they attempt to distinguish between different kinds of topics (such as "aboutness" topics and "contrastive" topics). The diagnostics consist of judging how felicitous it is to follow a discourse with either questions (''What about x?'') or sentences beginning with certain phrases (''About x, ... Speaking of x,'' ... ''As for x'', ...) to determine how "topical" ''x'' is in that context.

Given and new

Intuitively, '' givenness'' classifies words and information in a discourse that are already known (or given) by virtue of being common knowledge, or by having been discussed previously in the same discourse ("anaphorically recoverable"). Certain theories (such as Roger Schwarzschild's GIVENness Constraint) require all non-focus-marked constituents to be given. Words/information that are not given, or are "textually and situationally non-derivable" are by definition ''new''.

References

{{Formal semantics Linguistics Semantics Formal semantics (natural language)