What is information structure?

There has been and still is disagreement and confusion in linguistic theory about the nature of the component of language referred to in this book as information structure and about the status of this component in the overall system of grammar. The difficulties encountered in the study of information structure are in part due to the fact that grammatical analysis at this level is concerned with the relationship between linguistic form and the mental states of speakers and hearers and that the linguist dealing with information structure must deal simultaneously with formal and communicative aspects of language. Information-structure research neither offers the comfort which many syntacticians find in the idea of studying an autonomous formal object nor provides the possibility enjoyed by sociolinguists of putting aside issues of formal structure for the sake of capturing the function of language in social interaction.

Negative or defeatist views of information-structure research are therefore not uncommon, even among linguists who emphasize the importance of the study of linguistic pragmatics. The following quote concerning the role of topic and focus in linguistic theory illustrates such views: “Terminological profusion and confusion, and underlying conceptual vagueness, plague the relevant literature to a point where little may be salvageable” (Levinson 1983:x). In his own book on pragmatics, Levinson explicitly excludes the analysis of the relationship between pragmatics and sentence form, in particular the analysis of topic-comment structure.