Comparative and contrastive studies of information structure (review)

This volume contains a collection of articles based on original contrastive and comparative research on information structure, most of which were presented at the conference Contrastive Information Structure Analysis held at the University of Wuppertal in March 2008. As the introduction states, the book is motivated by the editors’ and contributors’ conviction that a comparative and contrastive approach to information structure is beneficial in several respects: by providing insights into both language-specific and universal aspects of information structure and by clarifying the functional properties and formal representations of information-structural categories. A special merit of the book is that the editors draw attention to the distinction between a more general comparative approach and a more specific contrastive analysis, with several contributions clearly demonstrating the advantage of a specific contrastive perspective for grammatical description.

The articles of the volume discuss different languages, information-structural notions, and a variety of constructions, applying different perspectives (including language acquisition, diachronic development, and typological generalizations) and also taking various types of empirical data into consideration (e.g. introspective data, semi-spontaneously produced data, attested data from spoken child language, and adult language corpora). Nevertheless, the editors have managed to integrate the heterogeneous analyses and data of the eight articles into a whole not only by setting the comparative/contrastive perspective for all articles, but also by framing the volume with two additional excellent chapters, an introductory and a concluding one. While the ‘Introduction’ (1–14), written by the editors Carsten Breul and Edward Göbbel together with Alexander Thiel, provides a comprehensive presentation and well-founded assessment of the individual articles, the final article by Carsten Breul, ‘On the foundations of the contrastive study of information structure’ (277–304), is devoted to the discussion of methodological issues. Besides addressing the ontological and methodological aspects of contrastive information-structure analysis, emphasizing the heuristic specificity of contrastive linguistics, Breul also takes up some illuminating examples from several contributions (Lambrecht, Cohen, López, Skopeteas and Fanselow, Gast), summarizing relevant results of the volume.

The mapping of grammatical (syntactic and prosodic) structures and (discourse-semantic) interpretations is of central relevance in all articles, although the points of departure for the analyses differ. Whereas in several works information-structural notions and functions (like subinformativity, givenness, discourse anaphoricity, focusing, topicality) serve as tertium comparationis, showing various grammatical representations in different languages, others concentrate on certain forms and structures whose realizations depend on information-structural notions (clefts, reflexives, null subjects, interrogatives).

Volker Gast’s work, ‘Contrastive topics and distributed foci as instances of sub-informativity: A comparison of English and German’ (15–50), belongs to the first mentioned group of papers, focusing on a specific aspect of information structuring, that is, the encoding of subinformativity in English and German. Sentences are called ‘subinformative’ if they answer the current ‘question under discussion’ only partially. This notion, introduced by Büring (2003), is further elaborated by subsuming occurrences not only of contrastive topics (with two subcategories, ‘context-changing’ versus ‘context-preserving’) but also of distributed (multiple) foci. The author identifies an interesting contrast in the prosodic domain: while German has a contour specialized for ‘context-changing (topic-related) subinformativity’ (the ‘root contour’), English uses the functionally very general fall-rise contour in order to express ‘incompleteness’ and ‘uncertainty’. This article is of special interest not only because of the discussion of relevant methodological questions and the detailed elaboration of the information-structurally relevant notion of subinformativity, but also due to the careful discussion of the differing functional potential of the prosodic contour ‘fall-rise’ in the two languages.

Luis López’s article, ‘Givenness and discourse anaphors’ (51–76), investigates the formal indicators of the information-structural category ‘background’ and argues for the separation of ‘givenness’ and ‘discourse anaphoricity’ within this concept. Discourse anaphoricity is claimed to be a subcategory of givenness obligatorily connected to an antecedent. According...