Information structure

Information structure as the hinge between sentence and discourse has been at the center of interest for linguists working in different areas such as semantics, syntax or prosody for several decades. A constraint-based grammar formalism such as HPSG that encodes multiple levels of linguistic representation within the architecture of signs opens up the possibility to elegantly integrate such information about discourse properties into the grammatical architecture. In this chapter, I discuss a number of approaches that have explored how to best integrate information structure as a separate level into the representation of signs. I discuss which lexical and phrasal principles have been implemented in these approaches and how they constrain the distribution of the various information structural features. Finally, I discuss how the various approaches are used to formulate theories about the interaction of syntax, prosody and information structure. In particular, we will see several cases where (word order) principles that used to be stipulated in syntax can now be formulated as an interaction of syntax and discourse properties.