The Prosodic Realisation of Given and New Information
Information Structure in Spoken English - A Systemic Functional Linguistics View - Gerard O'Grady
Gerard O'Grady [+]
Cardiff University
Description
Chapter 3 focuses on the system of Information. It details the importance of tonality and tonicity in the speaker’s projection of which lexical items are Given and which are New. Close examination of tonality choices illustrates that while tone groups/information units are often coterminous with clauses, it is more accurate to say that they also frequently correspond to clausal cores and sub-clausal units. Hence there will be more tone groups/information units than clauses in a text. This fact entails that New elements may occur at any point within a clause. While there is strong evidence equating tone groups with information units and the tonic syllable with Focus, the informational status of pre-tonic lexical items is far less clear. One of the reasons for this it that the concept of recoverability is itself on close examination not entirely clear.