The Application Study Of Information Structure In English Discourse Analysis

Centered on Information Structure (IS in short form), the thesis systematically studies and analyzes the IS in discourse from the perspectives of semantics and phonetics respectively. In this thesis the qualitative analysis as well as quantitative analysis is employed.Information Structure is the organization model of Given and New information in the course of information transmission. The dissimilarities between Theme and IS lie in the six aspects: relation with the clause, forms, sequence of occurrence, necessity of occurrence, criteria and relation with the context. In a discourse, the distribution of Given + New information and Theme + Rheme is not one to one correspondence relation absolutely. Theme can carry not only Given information, but also New information, part of New information and Zero information; Rheme can carry New information, part of New information, part of Given information and Given information; Theme and Rheme can together carry New information, too.Information Focus (IF in short form) refers to a cross-linguistic semantic phenomenon related to the highlighting of information for communicative purposes. Focus is typically connected to words in an utterance that are perceived by hearers as stressed or emphasized by speakers.Information Focus is divided into Narrow Focus and Broad Focus in this thesis. Accent and syntactic devices can mark Focus. IF and Nucleus refer to the same item in a clause. The placement of Nucleus changes with the change of IF. In the unmarked condition, IF falls on the last lexical item. So does Nucleus. While in the marked condition, marked Focus is associated with the shift of Nucleus.Based on the above analysis and research, two hypotheses which are the novelty of the thesis are raised by the writer. The first one is that Theme in Wh-question not only can carry New information but also carry Information Focus; and the second is that Focus covers longer time than any other word in the reading time in a clause. GoldWave software (a kind of sound editor and phonetic analysis software) is used toprove the correctness of the hypotheses with the Listening Comprehension, section A of CET-4 held in December, 2003 as the research material. In the 10 questions of Section A, there are 45 information Foci and Focus-clusters. In each question, the interrogative words what (in Question 1, 2, 3,5, 6, 7, 8. 9,10) and where (in Question 4 only) not only carry Theme, but also carry New information. According to the GoldWave software analyses, the volume of the intenogative word is the highest and carries prominence in each clause. Among these 45 foci, 29 foci (64%) cover the longest time in reading. 16 foci (36%) do not cover the longest time in reading because in these clauses, the Nuclei have tails.IF can highlight New information, but IF can also highlight Given information because of the issues of accent, discourse shift and contrastivity.