Information Structure A Cognitive Orientation

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5.2.5.2 Information Structure

Another aspect of the cognitive dimension is the relationship between the information structure of a text and the mental processes involved in its interpretation. 3 The study of information structure …is not primarily concerned with the interpretation of words or sentences in given conversational contexts, but rather with the discourse circumstances under which given pieces of propositional information are expressed via one rather than another possible morphosyntactic or prosodic form. Lambrecht 1994, 5 In the information structure of a text, the various linguistic items which are used to compose the text have different propositional or referential functions. Nominal items, for example, refer to physical or conceptual entities in the world, while verbal items refer to actions and states, and other linguistic items encode relationships and connections. Still other items in the text are signals which aid the listener or reader in his or her interpretation of the communication. These signals are not referential in the same way as concepts and actions, but are essential for the proper interpretation of the text. In the temporal organization of text, many time references are not referential in the same way as other linguistic items, but are in the text to assist the readerlistener in tracking properly with the temporal flow of the narrative depiction. With reference to , it is important to know how it functions in the text’s temporal organization—does it maintain the same time frame of what precedes it or does it establish a new time frame? Questions like this will be dealt with in Chapter 10. 3 The concepts implemented here are based on the model developed in Lambrecht 1994, Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, Focus and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents. 106 The cognitive orientation implemented here has been particularly influenced by Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By 1980, Jackendoff’s Patterns in the Mind: Language and Human Nature 1994, Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance: Communication and Cognition 1995, Lambrecht’s Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, Focus and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents 1994, and Fauconnier’s Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language 1985. Rather than go into further detail here, the reader is referred to these publications for broader conceptual background.

5.3 Summary

Within this functional, typological, contextual and discourse-pragmatic framework, text analysis requires sensitivity to the various intersecting networks within which linguistic entities from every level function in communicative situations. The goal is not just analysis of the discourse structure of a text, but attention to the communicative nature of language use.