ON SOME CONTROVERSIAL ISSUES IN THE DESCRIPTION OF INFORMATION STRUCTURE IN LANGUAGE AND UTTERANCES

The purpose of the present paper is to discuss the different and often conflicting approaches to information structure and to propose a modified approach to some linguistic phenomena related to it. For the purpose of this paper information structure is roughly equated with the so-called thematic-rhematic structure of a sentence or utterance (e.g. Boguslawski 1977), originally described as actual sentence analysis (Mathesius 1939), or communicative dynamism and/or functional sentence perspective (Firbas 1992).