Introduction

Whenever a sentence is uttered or written, it is done so in a particular communicative context, and for the addressee to correctly interpret the communicative intent of the speaker/writer, the addressee must interpret the sentence in that same context. But as this context goes far beyond the immediate linguistic context to include assumptions of many different types, identification of the proper context by the addressee is not always possible, and so misunderstandings can take place. In order to decrease the chance of misunderstanding, the speaker, in creating the sentence, tailors the form of the sentence to allow the hearer to create the proper context for interpretation with minimal processing effort. For his part, the hearer assumes that the sentence will be tailored in just this way, and so takes the first proposition that comes to mind as the one the speaker intended to communicate, and the first associated set of contextual assumptions that come to his mind as the intended background assumptions. A crucial aspect of this tailoring is the distribution of information in the sentence, which we will call the ‘information structure’ of the sentence (similar to what the Prague School linguists called ‘the functional sentence perspective’). To give one simple example, in the most common type of situation this generally means that the NP referring to the topic that is being spoken about will come first, and the expression of the comment being made about the topic will follow.