infrmatin struture in isurse twars an integrate：信息结构在语篇中的整合.pdf

Information Structure in Discourse: Towards an Integrated Formal Theory of Pragmatics1 Craige Roberts, The Ohio State University For many linguists interested in pragmatics, including the Prague School theorists, Halliday (1967), and Vallduví (1992,1993), inf ormation structure is a sentence-level structure. It is generally characterized as a variation of sentential structure along certain parameters to modulate the presentation of the information imparted by the sentence in such a way as to relate that information to prior context. The factors in that relationship are characterized in terms of primitive functional roles such as theme/rheme, focus/(back)ground, topic/link, old/new, etc. These primitives and the correlated information structure of sentences are used to explain the roles of intonational focus and of particular syntactic focus constructions, of topicalization and other displacement transformations, and of a fairly wide range of other phenomena, including, e.g., word order in relatively free word order languages such as German, the functions of distinguished structural positions in Catalan or Hungarian, definiteness in Slavic languages, specificity in Turkish, use of specific affixes such as Japanese -wa, etc. Most researchers who work on focus, topic, etc., talk about their relationship to felicity, and hence to the context of utterance. But few look beyond the sentence to examine in any detail the range of kinds of contexts in which an utterance with a given focus is actually felicitous.2 Kadmon & Roberts (1986) argued that this methodology was crucial to understanding the role of focus in interpretation. They claimed that at its most abstract, this role is that of constraining (via conventional presuppositions) what they called the inf ormation structure of contexts in which the utterance would be felicitous. This perspective on informatio