Information Structure: Afterword

In its present incarnation, the paper on Information Structure originally written in 1996 appears in the form in which it has been most circulated, a lightly revised version dating from 1998. These notes offer some background and history on the development of the framework discussed there, and a very brief overview of its subsequent development and my current views about the role of the context of utterance in interpretation. In the interest of brevity, I will not attempt to discuss all the details of the original paper which bear further consideration or revision — e.g. the details of the proposed treatment of prosodic focus. See the bibliography linked to Appendix A for subsequent discussions of many of these and other matters, by myself and others. As a graduate student in Linguistics at UMass/Amherst in the 1980s, I was fortunate to be exposed to a number of new developments bearing on the relationship between formal semantics and pragmatics. In the 1970s under the influence of Cresswell, Lewis, Montague, and Partee, enormous progress in semantics was made possible by narrowing the focus of the field mainly to consideration of the conventional, truth conditional content of an indicative utterance, calculated compositionally as a function of the semantic contributions of its parts and its syntactic structure. Context was typically relegated to the background, in the form of indices of evaluation, though occasionally popping out for more serious consideration, as in the work of Kaplan, Karttunen, and Stalnaker. But eventually the nature of the rigorous