Information Structure in Linguistics Research Paper

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The fundamentally interactive character of natural language, anchored in communication, is reﬂected by the impact of context (consituation) on sentence structure. Typically, the sentence is divided not only into syntactic subject, predicate, objects, adverbials, etc., but also into what corresponds to cognitively ‘given’ and ‘new’ information. This ‘information structure’ of the sentence (its ‘topic-focus articulation,’ TFA, or its division into ‘theme’ and ‘rheme’ or ‘comment’) has been established in linguistic writings of the latter half of the twentieth century as one of the constitutive aspects of grammatical structure, rather than just as an issue of the use of language in communication that would be determined only by contextual conditions of the distribution of sentences.

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1. Topic-focus Articulation, Aboutness and Presupposition

TFA can be illustrated by the following examples (in which capitals indicate intonation center (IC, main sentence stress, falling), cf. Sect. 4):

I was writing this study on the WEEKENDS. (1a)

On the weekends I was writing this STUDY. (1b)

Yesterday John visited BOSTON. (2a)

JOHN visited Boston yesterday. (2b)

John visited Boston YESTERDAY. (2c)

Jim’s brother did not insult MARY. (3a)

Mary was not insulted by Jim’s BROTHER. (3b)

As (1) documents, the opposition of focus (F, which carries the IC and in the primary case is placed at the end of the sentence) and topic (T, referring to ‘given’ information) is relevant for the semantic interpretation of the sentence (even for its truth conditions: there are situations, or ‘possible worlds’ in which (1b) can be used as a true statement, but (1a) would not be true). Thus, although the information structure (TFA) is closely connected with contextual conditions of the use of sentences (e.g., as answers to diﬀerent questions), it belongs to the information expressed by grammatical means (sentence prosody, word order (WO), and in languages such as Japanese or Tagalog by speciﬁc particles) and relevant for the linguistic meaning of the sentence. The WO shift in (1) can be understood as primary, prototypically accompanied by passivization in English, cf. (3) although it occurs also with the active verb in languages with a higher degree of ‘free’ WO, cf. e.g., Czech, Marii (Accus.) urazil Jimu BRATR (Nomin.). In English, a shift of IC is more or less equivalent: ‘Jim’s BROTHER insulted Mary.’

In declarative sentences TFA corresponds to the ‘aboutness’ relation in the sense of F being asserted about T. Thus, in (2a) it is asserted about John (x) and yesterday (y) that what x did at timepoint y was to visit Boston. In (2b) it is asserted about yesterday’s visit to Boston that it was carried out by John, and (2c) asserts about John (x) and Boston (z) that x visited z precisely yesterday (or, with the verb being included in T, it asserts about John’s visit to Boston that it occurred yesterday).

A positive sentence can be interpreted as asserting that F holds about T, i.e., as F(T). The prototypical negative sentences, such as those in (3), are used to assert that F(T) does not hold, which means that what is under negation is identical to F (the expression ‘under negation’ will be made more precise in Sect. 3); T then is not under negation and a typical deﬁnite noun group in T triggers a presupposition that is not present if this group is included in F, as in (3b): while both (3a) and its positive counterpart entail the existence of Jim’s brother, this is not entailed by (3b), in which the entailment can be classiﬁed as an allegation, rather than a presupposition or a case of ‘meaning proper.’ It is not exact to speak of a presupposition of existence; in certain cases, especially in sentences directly concerning existence (in the actual world), what is presupposed is not the existence, but rather the referential availability of the object concerned (an abstract object, a mythical being, etc.), or its presence in the part of the universe of discourse that is assumed by the speaker to be accessible to the hearer(s), cf. ‘The gifts are from your parents,’ ‘Santa Claus does not exist,’ or also ‘White crows would have red eyes, if they existed.’

It is a speciﬁc question under which conditions a diﬀerence in TFA has a direct impact on the truth conditions of sentences. A similar situation is known from predicate logic, in which, e.g., the order of ‘for every x’ and ‘there exists a y’ is relevant, although the order of two variables bound by the existential quantiﬁer is not relevant (‘Every child passed an EXAM’ is weaker than ‘An exam was passed by every CHILD,’ but ‘A child passed an EXAM’ and ‘An exam was passed by a CHILD’ share their truth conditions.)

It can be argued that there is a diﬀerence between contrastive and non-contrastive F; while the sentences in (1)–(3) can occur as typical answers to questions such as ‘When were you writing this study?’ ‘What were you doing on the weekends?’ ‘Which town did John visit yesterday?,’ etc., the cleft construction in (4) would preferably be used in case of contrast, e.g., after ‘I am not sure which of your cousins was in Boston yesterday.’

It was JOHN who visited Boston yesterday. (4)

The concept of contrast (based on choice among alternatives) is also relevant for T, as discussed in Sect. 4 below.

2. Diﬀerent Traditions

In the light of the older European tradition, the pioneering insights of H. Weil, G. von der Gabelentz, Ph. Wegener, and others (cf. also the notion of ‘logical stress’ in Russian language teaching), V. Mathesius introduced an analysis of TFA into structural linguistics. The sentence has been analyzed as divided into a contextually bound and a non-bound part, i.e., into T and F; while the former can be expressed by weak, unstressed or zero pronominal elements, the latter is stressed. This and similar views have then been elaborated especially by Halliday (1967–8), by J. Firbas (1992), as well as by the research group of theoretical and computational linguistics in Prague (Sgall et al. 1986), by D. Bolinger, W. Chafe, T. Reinhart, then (with the division of T or ‘ground’ into

‘link’ and ‘tail’) by Vallduvı and Engdahl (1996), and, in Chomskian linguistics, by R. Jackendoﬀ, M. Rochemont, and others. Recently, centering theory (A. Joshi, B. Grosz, E. Prince) attempts to determine which sentence part probably will occur as (or in) the T of the next utterance.

Some of the approaches based on constituency or conﬁgurationality face problems connected with the fact that neither T nor F is, in the general case, a single constituent, as can be illustrated by (5) and (6), where the sign ‘ ’ indicates the T/F (F/T) boundary:

(How have you spent the vacations?) We went @ for a week to the ADRIATIC (rather than for the whole month to Mallorca, as we had planned). (5)

(What happened to Mary in the valley?) A WASP bit @ her. (6)

It is then necessary to work either with speciﬁc rules of ‘focus inheritance’ (adding more constituents to F, see Selkirk 1995), or with multiple derivations such as those of Steedman’s (1996) combinatory categorial grammar, if the authors do not want to multiply the articulations, diﬀerentiating, e.g., between an opposition of background vs. focus, and that of topic vs. comment. It may be seen as more advantageous to use dependency syntax (as known from European structural linguistics) and an elaboration of certain notions originally introduced by J. Firbas: as discussed in Hajicova et al. (1998) and in the writings quoted there (a formal treatment was presented by Petkevic 1995), the scale of communicative dynamism (CD) can be handled as an underlying order, which diﬀers from the surface or morphemic order especially in sentences in which IC (carried by the most dynamic item) occupies a secondary position (not at the end of the sentence), as is the case in (2b), (4), and (6) above; contextual boundness (as a grammaticalized feature of every lexical occurrence) can be understood as a primitive notion. This allows for a subtle classiﬁcation of notions such as ‘broad’ and ‘narrow’ F; the T/F boundary can then be speciﬁed as determined by a single edge of the dependency tree (which constitutes the core of the sentence structure).

On the other hand, there is a tradition started by J. Jacobs (1983) and continued by M. Krifka, M. Rooth, K. von Fintel, D. Bu. ring, and others, whose approaches are based on the analysis of the positions and functions of focus sensitive particles (such as ‘only,’ ‘also,’ ‘even’). The foci and backgrounds of the particles and their contextually conditioned properties are systematically studied by methods of formal semantics. An attempt at a synthesis of the two approaches, oﬀered by B. H. Partee and her coauthors (Hajicova et al. 1998), is summarized in the next section.

3. The Focus Of The Sentence And The Focus Of A Particle

As example (3) above illustrates, what is under negation in the primary case is F. In secondary cases, (a) the negation itself, together with the verb, belongs to T, and only the verb is negated, cf. (7), or (b) negation constitutes the whole F, and (a part of) T is under negation, cf. (8):

My brother didn’t come to the party since he was ILL. (7)

(e.g., after ‘Why didn’t your brother come to the party?’)

My brother DIDN’T come to the party. (8)

Jane told me that yesterday she did not SUCCEED. (9)

In the secondary cases, and also if negation is present in an embedded clause, not only the articulation of the sentence into F and T is relevant, but also the focus of the negation particle and its scope: in (7) only T, i.e., the main clause, is the scope of negation and ‘come to the party’ is its focus (i.e., is under negation); in (9) only the ‘that’-clause is the scope and its verb is the focus of negation. It is then possible to deﬁne the background of the particle as its scope minus its focus.

This concerns also other focus sensitive particles or operators (focalizers), as can be illustrated by examples from German, the WO of which is more perspicuous than that of English. Prototypically, the focalizer is placed at the T/F boundary:

Er ist nicht/auch/eben/sogar/nur/mit

großer Freude nach PRAG gekommen. (10)

[He – has – not/also/precisely/even/only/with – great – pleasure – to PRAGUE – come.]

Also in the secondary cases, other focalizers occur in a position similar to that of negation: the focalizer belongs to T in (11) and constitutes the whole F in (12):

Er ist wegen seiner FRAU nicht/auch/ …gekommen.

[He has due – to his WIFE not/also/…come.] (11)

Dein Bruder war dort NICHT/AUCH …

[Your brother was there NOT/TOO/… ] (12)

In English, WO is more ambiguous, e.g., in (13) F has several possible ranges (the positions of the T/F boundary on diﬀerent readings are again marked by ‘@’):

Martin only gave a ﬂower to a GIRL. (13) It follows that it is necessary to distinguish between (a) the sentence focus F, typically placed after the topic, marked by IC and empirically speciﬁable with the use of operational criteria such as the question test or a test with a negative or adversative continuation, and (b) the focus of a focalizer (ﬀ ). In the unmarked case ﬀ is identical with F (cf. (3), (10) and (13) above), but this is not the case in secondary examples (such as (11) and (12)).

If negation is one of the focalizers, then in the absence of an overt focalizer the positive modality of the verb can be interpreted as a focalizer (see Jacobs 1984), which is not overtly present in the sentence, but is relevant for its semantico-pragmatic interpretation (i.e., a procedure leading from underlying representations to an account of the content of the expressed statements, questions, etc.). Two studies on issues of the interpretation of TFA by means of post-Montague semantics—B. H. Partee’s investigation of the re- lationship of ‘allegation’ to accommodation and J. Peregrin’s elaboration of the aboutness relation as that of an argument and a predicate—are included in Partee and Sgall (1997).

4. Means Of Expression Of Information Structure

In the prototypical case, the (surface) WO corresponds to the scale of CD: T proper (the least dynamic item) occupies the leftmost position, and F proper (most dynamic) comes last. In sentences with a marked position of IC, this prosodic feature overshadows WO; F proper is expressed by the bearer of IC, cf. J. Pierrehumbert’s H*L accent and also the analyses by Ladd (1996), who outlines how TFA varies from one language to another, and Steedman (1996).

Diﬀering both from IC and from lexical stress of individual words, there are other kinds of stress, which are to be classiﬁed and speciﬁed as to their positions in several hierarchies. Some of these kinds of stress (phrasal, contrastive, or the rising interrogative contour) are immediately relevant for sentence structure, whereas others express diﬀerent (‘pragmatic,’ attitudinal) values, which do not directly belong to the system of language (various kinds of emphasis, wonder, aversion, doubts, and so on).

T proper often has a contrastive value (i.e., refers to an entity chosen from a set of alternatives determined by the context); this is expressed by a certain kind of phrasal stress, denoted here by italics:

Paul’s son has bought a new CAR and his daughter has got an APARTMENT of her own. (14)

It is often assumed that in sentences such as (14) a rising contrastive stress on the subject is present, which diﬀers from IC. Example (14) also shows that compound sentences include separate TFA patterns in their individual clauses.

If a focalizer occurs within T, its ﬀ (perhaps always a contrastive part of T) is marked (according to C. Bartels and others) by a speciﬁc kind of stress (which perhaps may be identiﬁed with the just mentioned contrastive stress), or at least by some other kind of rhythmic prominence, see Rooth (1992). This concerns also the ambiguous position of ‘only’ in his example reproduced here with a modiﬁcation concerning the phrasal stress (cf. the discussion in Hajicova et al. 1998, p. 157) as (15a); its preferred reading is identical with that of (15b), with ‘only’ in T:

People who grow rice often only EAT rice. (15a)

People who grow rice often EAT only rice. (15b)

5. Three Layers Of Word Order

Let us have a look at the following examples (with which the symbols for dependents such as Directional or Locative should be self-explaining):

They ﬂew from Chicago to Boston. (Dir. 1–Dir. 2) (16a)

A B

They ﬂew to Boston from Chicago. (16b)

B A

Jim dug a ditch with a hoe. (Objective–Means) (17a)

A B

Jim dug a DITCH with a hoe. (17b)

A B

Ron cannot sleep quietly in a hotel. (Manner–Loc) (18a)

A B

In a hotel Ron cannot sleep quietly. (18b)

B A

If A precedes B in the examples with normal intonation, then A belongs to T on some readings, to F on others; however, if B precedes A (or if A, preceding B, bears the IC), then B belongs to T. A similar relationship can be found with other pairs of arguments and adjuncts (with certain diﬀerences concerning groups of verbs, dialects, or generations), so that a basic scale can be established that determines their CD, with deviations possible only in case B is contextually bound (belongs to T); the diﬀerences between CD and WO (such as in (17b), or those concerning the position of the verb in German, etc.) can be handled by low-level rules. The existence and the basic shape of this ‘systemic ordering,’ known since the 1970s, has been conﬁrmed by several series of tests for Czech, German and to a certain extent for English, see Sgall et al. (1995).

Systemic ordering in English—a preliminary partial scale:

Temp–Actor–Addr–Obj–Origin–Eﬀect–Manner– Dir.1–Means–Dir. 2–Loc

This ordering can be speciﬁed in the lexical entries of verbs (and other head words), especially by the order of the obligatory and optional kinds of dependents in the valency frames. Another layer of order of the lexical items in the sentence is the CD (which within T may diﬀer from the systemic ordering), and the third layer is WO.

It can be concluded that at least the core of information structure belongs to grammar and can be described within frameworks with ﬂat patterns, such as dependency syntax; these representations may serve as input for an interpretation using methods of formal semantics. This holds for languages with the most varying degrees of ‘free’ WO. In most Slavic languages, Latin, etc., in which the basic syntactic relations are expressed by case endings, WO often is ‘free’ to correspond to CD. English or French, which express these relations by WO rather than by endings, use more syntactic reshaping (passivization, clefting, secondary placement of IC) to achieve such a correspondence between WO and CD.

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