A Pragmatic-Functional Account for Information Structures in English

초록

Languages differ in the way in which they deal with the manifestation of information structure in terms of information processing. The main purpose of this study is to identify the language-specific factors that characterize information processing in English. It is proposed that English, as a SVO-language and a subject-prominent language, prefers structural devices such as dummy subjects, non-referential pronouns, and clefting constructions for information processing. In addition, from a functional-pragmatic perspective, English tends to rely on constituent ordering variations to minimize the load of language processing and maximize language production. In particular, in a pragmatic-discourse level, certain types of grammatical structures are preferred for the purpose of pragmatic strategies, such as language processing advantage, the effectiveness of message presentation and information organization, and the maximization of language decoding process. Finally, the findings from this study reveal that information processing in English is dominantly influenced by the pragmatically-oriented principles, such as end-focus principle, end-weight principle, and given-new information structure, which lead to the patterns of ‘given-before-new’ and ‘light-before-heavy’ for the purpose of avoiding structural complexity and facilitating information processes.

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