The linguistic realization of information packaging

Abstract

There is increasing awareness of the large degree of crosslinguistic diversity involved in the structural realization of information packaging (or information structure). Whereas English and many Germanic languages primarily exploit intonation for informational purposes, in other languages, like Catalan, syntax plays the primary role in the realization of information packaging and intonation is reduced to a secondary role. In yet another group of languages the primary structural correlate is morphology. This paper provides a contrastive analysis of the structural properties of information packaging in a number of languages. It also contains a discussion of some basic issues concerning information packaging and identifies a set of information-packaging primitives that are applied to the crosslinguistic facts.