On Syntactic Realization Of Information Structure In English And Chinese

Traditionally, information structure deals with the sequencing of given and new information in information transmission, and it is usually characterized as the interface of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. The distribution of information in syntactic constructions has been an issue in functional linguistics. Information structure has experienced a research of a long period of time. The Prague School, based on psychological background, proposes a notion-'the Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP)'(Mathesius, 1929) to analyze the partition of sentence meaning. Halliday (1967) first introduces the term, information structure, informally describing the organization of spoken sentence, and further adds other aspects to it. such as thematic structure. Chafe (1976) attempts to redefine it with respect to 'consciousness', and Chomsky (1971) makes the claim that the interpretation of it should be integrated into semantics.Most researchers adopt a dichotomy of information structure-given and new information, assigning different labels to syntactic constituents based on their own background theory. But these labels only indicate the functions of different syntactic constituents, without involving their effect on syntactic construction. That is, the former researchers mainly adopt a direction-inverted approach to the research: from syntactic construction to information structure.The paper holds the view that information structure is a pragmatic-semantic notion. Within context, it is the Relation Maxim that constrains the syntactic realization of information structure. Out of context, other pragmatic principles (Processibility Principle, Clarity Principle, Economy Principle, Manner Maxim, and Quantity-Quality Maxim) tend to affect the arrangement of information units, but these pragmatic principles mainly work for the rules of either end focus or preposed focus. However, sometimes, the relation and the arrangement among different information units appear to be a kind of people's conceptualization. Incognitive linguistics, conceptualization is a semantic structure which encodes the rules constraining the structure of reality. So in cognition, information structure is conceptualization or semantic structure. Conceptualization, as a general term, involves some specific conceptualization processes constructed on different cognitive models (proposition, image schema, metaphor, metonymy) based on different structures of reality. So we suggest that sometimes the syntactic realization of information structure is subject to some specific conceptualization processes.Further, we need to make clear that the information status of an entity or an event in cognition is quite different from that in communication, so they have different divisions of information structure. In the analysis of the cognitive motivations, we propose a cognitive dichotomy of information structure 'prominence-less prominent', and a notion of 'degree of prominence'. Prominent-less prominent information does not hold a one-to-one relation to new-given information.From diachronic perspective, grammatical rules can be regarded as fully grammaticalized semantic content and pragmatic factors. Since information structure appears to be a pragmatic-semantic notion, grammatical rules can be seen as the grammaticalization of information structure, or specifically as the fossilization of syntactic constituents carrying different information in word order patterns. The formation of syntactic constructions has undergone a process of grammaticalization. A certain syntactic construction formed on synchronic level can be regarded as one of its variants during its diachronic grammaticalization, so in this syntactic construction there is a degree of fossilization of the syntactic constituents carrying different information in word order patterns, i.e., there is a degree of grammaticalization of information structure.Based on the above issues, this paper, first from synchronic perspective, attempts to make an analysis of how information structure is syntactically realized, i.