Information Structure

Question 1

What is the study of information structure?

Answer 1

studying how speakers structure utterances in order to facilitate information exchange

ex. which grammatical they use, how much they incorporate addressee knowledge

Question 2

What’s the assumption of compositionality?

Answer 2

if language is generated, syntax will still be about
how we put words together to make units

Question 3

What’s the assumption of idiomaticity?

Answer 3

If language is retrieved, syntactic units become form-
meaning pairs that include intonational information, pragmatic
content, etc.

Question 4

What is topic and focus?

Answer 4

Focus is the informative, newsy, contrary-to-expectation information

Topic corresponds to the non-informative, known, or predictable information

Question 5

The topic is what the sentence is about and is typically expressed as a referent that can be tracked throughout discourse.

Topics are often….

Answer 5

definite, animate, and 1st/2nd person

Question 6

From an information structure perspective, we can look at word order as being dependent on…

Answer 6

… the context and communicate goals of the speaker