Introduction

Historians of linguistics and theorists of information structure are in complete agreement: Georg von der Gabelentz was a pioneer of information structure. He counts among the first scholars who recognized that parts of sentences can be categorized in terms of their role in the communication between the speaker and the listener, the area which is today labelled ‘information structure’.

In Gabelentz's (1869) first publication on the subject, he discusses the sentences Napoleon wurde bei Leipzig geschlagen (lit. ‘Napoleon was near Leipzig defeated’) and Bei Leipzig wurde Napoleon geschlagen (lit. ‘Near Leipzig was Napoleon defeated’). Both sentences have the same grammatical structure and their factual content is identical. But, as Gabelentz claims, there is a difference: in the first sentence, the speaker talks about Napoleon, in the second sentence about Leipzig's surroundings.

Gabelentz accounts for this difference by saying that the first sentence element (in the first sentence Napoleon, in the second sentence bei Leipzig) always indicates what the speaker ‘wants the listener to think about’ (worüber [der Redende] den Angeredeten denken lassen will); he introduces the term ‘psychological subject’ (das psychologische Subject) to refer to this element. The subsequent parts of the sentence together constitute what is dubbed the ‘psychological predicate’ (das psychologische Prädicat): this element represents what the listener ‘must think about’ the psychological subject (was [der Angeredete] daruber denken soll) (Gabelentz, 1869, p. 378).