The Fundamental Significance of Information Structure the Fundamental Significance of Information Structure

1. Remarks on semantics and pragmatics Jacob Mey has contributed most effectively to recognizing the importance of pragmatics. Even a specification of truth conditions (as Carnap's propositions, or in a situational framework) requires the reference of certain items in the sentence to be determined. Thus, pragmatic factors have to be reflected as fundamental and included into the procedure of interpretation. This also concerns tense and modalities, as well as information structure or Topic-Focus Articulation (TFA). Many linguistic approaches are crucially mistaken underestimating the fundamental position of TFA. However, already the Aristotelian notions may be understood as referring to Topic (T) and Focus (F): ò , 'the given circumstances', and ò , 'the enounced'. Natural language differs from the calculi of logic or from programming languages due to its interactivity, to the contextual anchoring of utterances (sentence occurrences). The speaker does not just tell someone something, but rather s/he tells the addressee(s) something about something. If the content of an utterance is seen as an operation on the hearer's memory, then the interpretation should reflect that a declarative sentence asserts that its F holds about its T. TFA reflects the 'given-new' strategy of communication, but differs from it belonging to individual languages, rather than to the domain of cognition. This follows from the semantic relevance of TFA (cf. Section 3) and from the differences in the means expressing TFA: although the placement of the intonation center always is relevant, means such as word order, morphemic items, or syntactic constructions differ from one language to the other. Thus, the interactivity of communication is reflected not only in the patterning of discourse, but even in the structure of a sentence as a type, as a unit of language (langue, linguistic competence, I-language). The position of TFA in language remains undetermined if a specific level of information structure is postulated or if two relevant dichotomies are distinguished without systematically analysing the relevance of such a division for the scope of negation and of other focusing operators (focalizers). A comparison of different approaches to information structure would deserve a specific study. Let us just recall that in Prague, the interest in TFA has been strong for decades, especially thanks to V. Mathesius and J. Firbas. Research in the descriptive framework of the Functional Generative Description (FGD) and discussions on its comparison with other views have convinced us that TFA is more basic for sentence structure …