On the Rearrangement of Syntactic Constitutes for Information Structure

Abstract

Generally speaking, information structure deals with the sequencing of given and new information in information transmission and it is usually characterized as the interface of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Most researchers adopt a dichotomy of information structure-given and new information, assigning different labels to syntactic constituents based on their own background theory. But these labels only indicate the functions of different syntactic constituents, without involving their effect on syntactic construction. That is, the researchers mainly adopt a direction-inverted approach to the research: from syntactic construction to information structure.
Based on the above issues, this paper, attempts to make an analysis of how information structure is syntactically realized, i.e., the motivations for the syntactic realization of information examines pragmatic motivations for the syntactic realization of information structure. In this part, we still adopt the traditional terms for the division of information structure, such as “topic-focus”, etc. And we suggest that it is different conversational situations that first constrain the potential sequencing of information units, and it is this sequencing of information units that further affects our choice of syntactic constructions.