On Information Structure in Discourse Analysis
語言研究
作者：趙淩誌
Abstract： This paper attempts to comb the basic point of view of the theory of Information Structure from the angles of syntactic form， and explore three fundamental principles of the arrangement of information.
摘 要：本文主要從句法形式角度對信息結構這一重要語言學理論進行了分析，探討了話語分析中組織信息的基本原則。
Key words： Information Structure， syntactic form， fundamental principles
關鍵詞：信息結構；句法形式；基本原則
作者簡介：趙淩誌（1975.2-），女（漢），長春，長春工程學院外語學院，講師，碩士，主要從事外國語言學及應用語言學研究。
[中圖分類號]：H314.3 [文獻標識碼]：A
[文章編號]：1002-2139（2012）-21--01
I. Introduction：
Information Structure （IS） concerns structural and semantic properties of utterances reflecting their communicative intentions and their relation to discourse context. The study of information structure within texts was instituted by scholars of the Prague School. It was Halliday who brought many of the insights developed by the Prague scholars to the Western world. This paper attempts to outline Halliday’s point of view in spoken English firstly， then analyze the syntactic realization of information structure in written English.
II. Information Structure and Syntactic Form
2.1 The Definition of Given and New information
Given information is the information that the sender thinks the receiver already knows is given information. While New information is the information that the sender thinks the receiver doesn’t already know is new information. Most clauses also include information that is the focus of the speaker’s message， information that is considered new.
2.2 Given / New information and syntactic form
Halliday（2000）produced characteristics of given / new， in terms of speaker-expectations. ‘Given’ information is specified as being treated by the speaker as ‘recoverable either anaphoric or situational’ and ‘new’ information is said to be focal ‘not in the sense that it cannot have been previously mentioned， although it is often the case that it has not been， but in the sense that the speaker presents it as not being recoverable from preceding discourse. It has often been observed that， in English， new information is characteristically introduced by indefinite expressions and subsequently referred to by definite expressions.