Information Structure and Syntactic Structure

Abstract

This article explores the interface between syntactic structure and information structure – in particular, the broad generalizations that can be made between certain noncanonical word orders and information-structural constraints on their use. Various ways of implementing the distinction between ‘given’ and ‘new’ information are described, and several classes of word orders (such as preposings, postposings, argument reversals, and clefts) are discussed in terms of the information-status constraints to which they are sensitive. It is argued that classes of related word orders share related constraints but that – both cross-linguistically and within a single language – there are also construction-specific constraints on the correlation between word order and information status.