Chapter 11 Information structure (p. 397-398)

11.0. Introduction

This chapter presents a sketch of some aspects of Teiwa‘information packaging’ (Chafe 1976) or‘information structure’ (Lambrecht 1994). The information structure of a sentence is the formal expression of the pragmatic structuring of a proposition in a discourse (Lambrecht 1994:5). That is, in discourse, speakers can assume that there is information about already mentioned events and participants common to both them and their addressees, but other information which is not. The structuring of sentences along these parameters is called‘information structure’ (cf. Foley 2007: 403).

Crosslinguistically, information structure can be formally manifested in different ways: in aspects of prosodic structure such as focus stress; in special grammatical markers for topic or focus; in the form of nominal constituents and the ordering of such constituents in the sentence; in the form of complex grammatical constructions such as passives or antipassives; and in certain choices between related lexical items. A selection of these formal manifestations of information structure are found in Teiwa and discussed in this chapter. Here, I focus on those aspects of Teiwa information structure that I found most striking when I was examining and analysing the texts in my corpus. Note that the formal domain of information structure is the clause or sentence, so that the organisation of Teiwa discourse will not be discussed here.

The chapter is structured as follows. In section 11.1, I address the question how discourse participants are introduced in Teiwa texts. In section 11.2, I describe how constituents get contrastive or identificational focus by placing them in alternative positions in the clause, and by using long rather than short pronouns. In section 11.3, I describe the formal and functional characteristics of focus expressions marked with the focus marker la. La follows the phrase it governs and typically marks new information focus. While focused constituents are new information, just being introduced into the discourse, topics are closely related with given or old information. Section 11.4 describes the topic marker ta, which functions to encode topic discontinuity by announcing a new topic or reintroducing one that was introduced previously. In section 11.5, I briefly indicate the discourse function of two demonstratives that are frequently used in texts: i, which marks a forthcoming topic, and waal‘the one mentioned’, which refers to participants that have been introduced before.

11.1. The introduction of discourse participants

New discourse participants are nominal constituents (NPs) that occur with various modifiers, including nuk‘one’, which marks indefinite NPs (Ch. 5, section 5.5.1), and u‘Distal’, which marks definite NPs (Ch. 3, section 3.6.1). New discourse participants are introduced into the discourse by their own separate predicate: a verb of motion, posture, a deictic verb, or the existential verb pas‘be exactly’. After they have been introduced, the now given/known participants are referred to by short pronouns, or are not expressed at all, which results in zero anaphora across clauses.