The author first defines the following notions of information structure: focus (vs. background), given (vs. new), and topic (vs. comment). He then goes on to show how these notions are reflected in the prosodic systems of Slavic languages. Focus in all Slavic languages is reflected in prosodic prominence governed by a stress-focus correspondence defined by the author. In general, ‘given’ is realized outside the sentence stress. Focus does not have an obligatory prosodic reflex in Slavic languages.

Results from analyses of L1 and L2 Japanese written narratives are presented to discuss the relationships of backward-looking salience of referents and two morphosyntactic realizations of arguments: zero coding (i.e. discourse-driven zero anaphora) and topicalization with the topic marker wa. These forms are both known to be associated with givenness of information. The discussion of these forms is twofold. This chapter presents the analysis of discourse and chapter 4 presents the applications of RRG. For the discourse analysis, Centering Theory is utilized as the guiding framework, which will be extended with additional measures to define varying levels of salience. The usage of the two forms and their complementary and overlapping relationships are described in terms of the salience hierarchies proposed in this chapter, which also capture the L1–L2 differences in the usage of the argument forms and the more restricted usage of zero arguments in the L2 narratives.

In this chapter, we start by defining and illustrating the notions of discourse relations and connectives. We will see that even though the role of discourse connectives is to make discourse relations explicit in discourse, their use is not necessary for a discourse relation to be communicated. Conversely, connectives are not always associated with a specific discourse relation: many of them can convey various relations depending on the context. Another goal of this chapter is to situate discourse relations and connectives within the more general concepts of discourse cohesion and coherence. We will see that connectives represent one type of cohesive tie and that discourse relations are crucial elements ensuring local coherence within a discourse. In the last part of the chapter, we present some important underlying methodological and theoretical choices that were made when selecting the topics covered in the book and the data presented in each chapter. We also emphasize that the study of discourse connectives and relations has many interfaces with other domains of linguistic analysis such as semantics, pragmatics and syntax.

Syntactic variants are contentful: they don’t just differ by their syntactic structure, they also differ by their lexical content and, in speech, by their phonetic content. Do these different levels of linguistic architecture work individually or synergistically to create social meaning? By examining tag question constructions (like ’He were bad, though, weren’t he?’), this chapter shows how grammatical environment can work synergistically with other levels of linguistic architecture – including phonetics – to create social meaning. In modelling how to examine all of the linguistic characteristics of a syntactic item, this chapter shows how we might better integrate the study of syntactic variation into a wider understanding of the social meaning of language more generally. It also explores whether the universality of syntactic variables like tag questions (i.e., variables that everyone uses to some extent to express interactional positioning) means that they do not acquire the types of social meanings found for other linguistic variables.

This chapter introduces the theoretical constructs adopted by Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) in the treatment of information structure and addresses the question of the place of information structure in the architecture of grammar. It is claimed that RRG offers an approach to information structure which is flexible enough to capture the cross-linguistic variation in the role played by discourse in the semantics–syntax and syntax–semantics linking, while also being sufficiently constrained to make important generalizations on the expression of pragmatic states and pragmatic relations, and their interface with prosody, morphology and sentence structure.

This chapter introduces the two essential parts of a simple sentence: the subject and the predicate. A detailed discussion is provided on the various linguistic forms that can serve as the subject and the predicate, as well as their grammatical features.

This chapter shows that there were fundamental changes in two types of information structure: one is at the clause level, involving the arrangement of new and given information, and the other is at the predicate level, involving the arrangement of resultative and non-resultative (accompanying) information. The first is cross-linguistically true and can be found in many other languages; the second may be particular to the language and has thus far been known to exist only in Chinese. Throughout the entire history of Chinese grammar, these two principles of information organization are critical for understanding how the grammar has evolved over time. On the one hand, both reflect the results of grammatical developments; on the other hand, they motivated a series of significant changes in history that together have largely shaped the grammatical system of Contemporary Chinese.

Spoken or written texts are coherent sequences of sentences. Text comprehension is equivalent to the construction of multiple mental representations in working memory. It is based on an interaction between external text information and internal prior knowledge information stored in long-term memory. Mental representations include a text surface representation, a propositional representation, and a mental model. They are characterized by different forgetting rates. As speakers and authors omit information which can be easily completed by listeners and readers, text comprehension always includes inferences. Listening and reading comprehension use the same lexicon and the same syntax but qualitatively different text surface structures. Due to local and global coherence of texts, comprehension is also a process of mental coherence formation. Limitations of working memory require focused attention on the construction of topic-specific mental models which are carried along from sentence to sentence by a flow of consciousness. Speakers and authors can direct this process through topic information within the text surface.

Chapter 4 of Discourse Syntax (Variation in the Middle) introduces students to syntactic patterns that lead to sentences with non-canonical subjects or variation in the way the verb’s arguments are realized, including the object position. After discussing principles of canonical argument realization, including facts from language acquisition and insights from psycholinguistics, the chapter discusses the passive construction, including in preposition stranding contexts, and the verb-particle construction (also known as “phrasal verbs”), in the context of establishing topics, arranging given and new information, and shifting complex material to the end of the sentence (Principle of End-Weight). Woven into these explanations are data from current research in the text-linguistic and variationist approach and attestations from freely available corpora.

Chapter 3 of Discourse Syntax (Non-Canonical Beginnings) introduces students to sentences with non-canonical beginnings, which we define as the non-canonical placement of a core element of the clause to the left of the subject. Students learn to differentiate between topicalization, left-dislocation, and sentence-initial adjuncts, as well as different types of inversion, including locative inversion, and are introduced to how these syntactic patterns are used to structure the discourse – establishing topics, packaging information, providing signposts – and under which discourse conditions they occur. Woven into these explanations are data from current research in the text-linguistic and variationist approach and attestations from freely available corpora.

While Chinese is widely considered a topic-prominent language and 'topic' may be a useful notion for describing some of the unique grammatical features of Chinese, natural text/speech data call for a re-examination of its nature and the ways in which it is manifested and deployed in discourse. My multiple genre-based investigation shows that at a ratio of 4 percent to all clauses, topic constructions are a very rare type of construction in Chinese discourse among all the possible types of syntactic constructions. As such, the status of topic constrictions in Chinese needs to be rethought. An examination of the use of topic constructions in spontaneous conversation shows a number of surprising patterns, including: (1) topic is best described as located at speaker turn transition places; (2) topical elements are subject to speaker negotiation, so they do not have to be definite, identifiable, or shared at the time of the utterance; and (3) topical elements function quite differently in interaction depending on whether they are self-initiated, self-repeated, or other-initiated.

Clauses may represent one of three types of information packaging. The most common is topic--comment (referent--predication) packaging, assumed in Chapters 6–9. The topic may be the most central participant (the ‘subject’; see Chapter 6), or there may be multiple participants high in topicality. A variety of strategies is used when the most topical participant is not the most central one, or is not a participant at all. Thetic packaging does not divide a clause into topic and comment. Thetic packaging is associated with certain situation types (including weather), and discourse functions such as presentation and background description. Identificational packaging divides the information into a focus and a presupposed open proposition (POP). A number of contexts are typically construed as identificational, including questions and answers and different types of contrast. Thetic and identificational strategies include distinct prosody and word order, and/or distinct morphosyntax. Most thetic strategies involve making the subject argument phrase look less like a subject, and/or making the predicate look less like a predicate. Identificational strategies include clefts and ellipsis.

This chapter deals with the analyses of the grammatical phenomena that have been related to information structure in the Romance languages, and that have played a central role in the general research on the encoding of information-structure notions in the grammar and at the interfaces. An overview is presented of this work, which has offered a great contribution to our current understanding of both empirical and theoretical issues. Highly debated questions are addressed, such as the relationship between focus and newness and between topic and givenness, the grammatical and interpretive correlates of different types of focus and topics, and the ‘aboutness’ nature of topics in contrast with subjects.

Chapter 4 provides examples of reanalyses, rather than different choices, that are prompted by the Principle of Determinacy. The first change involves the reanalysis of a loosely adjoined phrase as a subject argument because a topicalized subject does not result in an optimal computation. The principle also accounts for changes involving copulas, both the change from demonstrative to copula and from topic to subject. Auxiliaries and quantifiers in English provide fertile ground to investigate determinacy, because these move from lower to higher heads and specifiers, respectively. It is shown that auxiliary movement indeed violates determinacy and that options exist to circumvent it, e.g. skipping T and reanalyzing as a higher functional head. Floating quantifiers do not violate determinacy because they first move as QPs and subsequent moves are of DPs.

This chapter presents an overview of the state of the art in the study of the linguistic realization of information structure and discourse structure in heritage languages (HLs). It surveys the key issues pertaining to the encoding and interpretation of topic and focus, categories related to the distinction between given and new information in discourse, and their role in the development of mechanisms for the construal and maintenance of pronominal anaphoric dependencies in HL systems. Given the broad cross-linguistic variation in the expression of information structure and a vast range of phenomena that fall under its scope, the chapter provides overviews of the particular morphological, syntactic, prosodic, and lexical means employed for the encoding of information-structural relations in typologically different HLs, followed by discussion that identifies some common principles emerging from the surveyed studies and relates them to current issues in heritage language acquisition research. Finally, some directions for future work in this area are offered.

This chapter reviews the syntactic and prosodic correlates of information structure in Germanic languages. The chapter starts with an introduction to the information structural notions: focus, topic, and givenness related to the way information is stored in human memory and organized in communication. The effect of information structure on prosody in these languages can be felt in several ways: pitch accent addition because of focus, pitch accent deletion because of givenness, topicalization because of topic. In syntax, the effects are also numerous: scrambling, a series of leftward movements: topicalization, passivization, dative construction, object-shift, and a series of rightward movements: extraposition, right-dislocation, heavy NP-shift, afterthought. Pronominalization and ellipsis are the results of givenness. At the end of the chapter, focus-sensitive particles (or “association with focus”) like exclusive only, additive also and scalar even, are shortly mentioned. Germanic languages show a wealth of effects, but they also differ among each other in subtle ways.