6 - Summary and conclusion

Summary

In this book, I have tried to present an integrated account of the relationship between the formal structure of sentences and the communicative situations in which sentences are used to convey pieces of propositional information. The account is based on the assumption that this relationship is governed by principles and rules of grammar, in a component called information structure. In this information-structure component, propositions, as conceptual representations of states of affairs, undergo pragmatic structuring according to the discourse situations in which these states of affairs are to be communicated. The pragmatic structuring of propositions is done in terms of a speaker's assumptions concerning the hearer's state of mind at the time of an utterance. Pragmatically structured propositions are then paired with appropriate lexicogrammatical structures.

The assumption that information structure is part of grammar, rather than of general human communicative competence, is based on the existence of a great number of grammatical features and feature combinations – morphosyntactic, prosodic, lexical – which have the unique purpose of signaling information-structure distinctions. These features are grammatical in the sense that the relationship between them and their interpretations is determined by linguistic convention rather than by general principles of communication. Information structure is thus to be distinguished from the general domain of conversational pragmatics, in which context-dependent interpretations of sentences are often determined by non-linguistic factors.