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Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, Focus, and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents
Abstract
Why do speakers of all languages use different grammatical structures under different communicative circumstances to express the same idea? Professor Lambrecht explores the relationship between the structure of the sentence and the linguistic and extra-linguistic context in which it is used. His analysis is based on the observation that the structure of a sentence reflects a speaker's assumption about the hearer's state of knowledge and consciousness at the time of the utterance. This relationship between speaker assumptions and formal sentence structure is governed by rules and conventions of grammar, in a component called 'information structure'. Four independent but interrelated categories are analysed: presupposition and assertion, identifiability and activation, topic, and focus.
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Citations
Cited by
Croft, W., & Cruse, D. A. (2004) · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511803864 · Cited by 3,316
Hopper, P. J., & Traugott, E. C. (2003) · doi:10.1017/cbo9781139165525 · Cited by 2,135
Constructions: A new theoretical approach to language
Goldberg, A. E. (2003) · Trends in Cognitive Sciences · doi:10.1016/s1364-6613(03)00080-9 · Cited by 1,812
Tomasello, M., Carpenter, M., & Liszkowski, U. (2007) · Child Development · doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01025.x · Cited by 1,039
Agency: The Relation between Meaning, Power, and Knowledge
Kockelman, P. (2007) · Current Anthropology · doi:10.1086/512998 · Cited by 196
Metadata
- Authors
- Lambrecht, K.
- Venue
- Cambridge University Press eBooks
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- Published
- 1994-09-08
- OpenAlex
- W66392269
- Cited by
- 3,053
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 12.23
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, Focus, and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1017/cbo9780511620607
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- Lambrecht, K. (1994). Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, Focus, and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents. Cambridge University Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511620607
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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