Language serves many purposes, the most important of which is communication. To enhance communication, the speech participants structure linguistic expressions in accordance with the purpose for which a given discourse serves. Information structure (henceforth, IS) is essentially about
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the structuring of these linguistic expressions to achieve linguistic needs (cf. Erteschik-Shir, 2007; Selkirk, 2008, Zimmermann, 2008). The label ‘IS’ is credited to Halliday (1967). Halliday employed this term in relation to his third type of meta-function of language referred to as the textual function. In discussing Halliday’s meta-functions of a language, Downing & Locke (2006) describes the textual function of a language as the way in which the speaker organises the content of a clause in order to achieve communicative requirements. According to these scholars, it is the textual function of language that makes a clause to cohere as a message. The other two functions are ideational (employed for representing the experience of the world) and interpersonal (which enacts personal and social relationships with others. Over time, alternative names for IS have been proposed. Some of the labels found in the linguistic literature for IS are Information packaging (Chafe, 1976) and Discourse pragmatics and informatics (Vallduví, 1990). For the purpose of this study, I keep the term IS as it is the most widely used one.
In this section, a theory of IS as outlined by Lambrecht (1994) is reviewed. Lambrecht (ibid.) takes a cognitive approach to IS, which coincides with an internalised- language approach which this study follows. I also review Aboh (2004) and Aboh, Corver, Dyakonova & van Koppen (2010) which specifically concern with information structure as realised in the left periphery of a nominal domain. Finally, I review Repp (2010) who tries to unpackage the differences between the information structural notions of contrast and contrastive focus, the notions which are very relevant to this study.
3.11.1 Lambrecht (1994)
Lambrecht (1994: 5) defines information structure as follows
“That component of sentence grammar in which propositions as conceptual representations of states of affairs are paired with lexicogrammatical structures in accordance with the mental states of interlocutors who use and interpret these structures as units of information in given contexts”. Three important aspects can be deduced from this definition. First, Lambrecht views information structure as about how the propositional content of a sentence is transmitted rather than the content itself. Secondly, a successful transmission of this content is contingent on the speaker’s assumption about the addressee’ mental state as far as the identifiability of the referents of sentence constituents is concerned. Thirdly, the speaker’s choice of grammatical structures or morphemes in putting across a message reflects his or her assumptions about the addressee’s mental state. In English, for example, the speaker would use the definite article ‘the’ under the assumption that the referent designated by a linguistic expression is identifiable (cf. Lyons, 1999).
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3.11.2 Topic and Focus
Lambrecht’s theory of topic and focus is couched on the notions of mental representations of entities in the mind. These notions subsume the psychological constructs of identifiability and activation.
3.11.2.1 Topic, identifiability and activation
Lambrecht (1999) characterises topic as a pragmatic category which is both identifiable and activated in the minds of both the speaker and hearer. According to Lambrecht, identifiability is concerned with whether the referent designated by a linguistic expression is already stored in the addressee’s mind or not. Thus, a referent can be identifiable or non-identifiable. As for activation, Lambrecht (1994) argues that it is related to the speaker’s assumption about the mental awareness/consciousness of the hearer on the discourse entities at the time of the speech. According to him, a referent in the hearer’s mind can be active, semi-active or inactive. A topic expression is active (lit up) in the addressee’ mind.
3.11.2.1 Focus, identifiability and activation
According to Lambrecht, the pragmatic category of focus constitutes a relation in which ‘presupposition and assertion is different’ (ibid.: 207). By this, he means that focus relates to information which is not shared by the speaker and addressee. A focal element is therefore new in the sense that the hearer cannot recover it from the discourse. It is also not yet active in the addressee’ mind. but it is in the hearer’s long memory.
3.11.2.1.1 Focus structures
In the linguistic literature, two types of focus are generally distinguished, namely informational/presentational focus and identificational/contrastive focus (cf. Kiss, 1998; Selkirk, 2008; Zerbian, 2006), Lambrecht discusses these types of focus under what he terms “focus structures”. Lambrecht describes a focus structure as the scope/domain of a sentence under which focus falls. He points out that every sentence has an element which information focus falls on. This element can be an argument, a predicate or the whole sentence. Consequently, three types of focus or focus structures are distinguishable, namely argument focus, predicate focus and sentence focus.
Argument focus
Lambrecht points out that an argument is an entity other than a predicate. Subjects, direct and indirect objects, and obligatory adjuncts are all sorts of arguments. He refers to a focus type in which the domain of the new information falls on one of these arguments as argument-focus. According to Lambrecht, argument-focus is the focus-presupposition type and it normally functions as
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identificational/contrastive focus i.e.it identifies an entity or a set of entities as both new and the only one among other possible alternatives.
(53) a. Did your husband buy a silver car? b. No, my husband bought a white car
In this example, a set of alternatives involves colours and it is white that is selected to the exclusion of silver.
Sentence focus
According to Lambrecht, sentence focus is presentational or an event-reporting type in which the domain of the new information corresponds to the entire proposition. That is, it includes arguments and predicate. He further points out that the function of sentence-focus is either to introduce a new referent (presentational sentences) or announce an event involving a new discourse event (event- reporting sentences).
(54) What happened? a. My phone cracked b. The lights went out
Each of the two sentences in example (54) is new information. i.e. the whole sentence is focused.
Predicate focus
Lambrecht maintains that predicate focus is a focus type in which the domain of the new information extends over the predicate to the exclusion of the subject. Predicate focus is Topic-comment type structures. This type of focus structure is a canonical order in many languages as a constituent which Topic usually occurs initially and a constituent occurs post-verbally.
(55) What happened to your phone? My phone cracked
In the example above, the predicate ‘cracked’ is in focus. This predicate is followed by no object argument. Thus, it is intransitive. The subject DP ‘my phone’ is a topic. To tell that ‘my phone’ is a topic, one may apply various heuristic tests that Lambrecht proposes including the ‘aboutness’ test, the ‘as-for’ test, the ‘concerning test’, among others. Thus, one may say ‘as for my phone, it cracked’, in which cake ‘my phone’ is clearly a topic.
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3.11.2.1.2 Focus marking
Lambrecht (1994) argues that the study of information structure can only be viewed as a component of grammar if psychological notions studied under it can have formal manifestations in human languages. According to Lambrecht, focus can be marked prosodically, morphologically and syntactically. If a language employs pitch accents, tonal morphemes, vowel length and other intonational or suprasegmental features to indicate that a constituent is in focus, then such a language marks focus prosodically. English is a good example of the languages which marks focus this way. For, example, the constituent ‘school’ in ‘the children went to school’ should be accentuated when it serves as a reply to the question ‘what did the children do next’? In other words, accentuation is a way to tell that this constituent is focused. A language or a group of languages may employ specialised morphemes to mark focus. Such morphemes may be independent or may be clitics on lexical items. Examples of the languages employing this focus mechanism include Japanese and many African languages (cf. Aboh, 2004 for Kwa languages). Yet other languages may mark focus by syntactic devices such as word order and syntactic processes such as clefting, dislocation, topicalization, inversion and the like. Romance languages such as Italian feature predominantly in this category.