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Linguistic forms vary depending on how information is packaged as new vs. old, as a topic vs. comment, or as a focus vs. background. The field of "information structure" investigates how information is organized in sentences and discourse, and how this is influenced by the discourse participants' knowledge and attention. The course will focus on English but deal with other languages in contrast. Among others, we will look at the following phenomena: 1) reference (definiteness, pronouns), 2) word order (e.g., active/passive, double object constructions, clefting), and 3) prosody and intonation. |
