Information Structure and Referential Givenness/Newness: How Much Belongs in the Grammar?

Abstract

I will be concerned in this paper with such concepts as topic, focus and cognitive status of discourse referents, which have been included under the label information structure (alternatively information status), as they relate in some sense to the distribution of given and new information. I will focus on the question of which aspects of information structural concepts and their properties are grammatically constrained and which are constrained by general cognitive and communicative principles that are independent of grammar. These are broad questions, and I obviously cannot hope to answer them fully and completely here. Instead, I will outline the kind of framework that I think needs to serve as the background for asking these questions and will make some tentative proposals for selected informational structural facts and properties within that framework.