Information Structure And Its Application In The Teaching Of College English Writing

The information structure of language is distinct from purely grammatical, cognitive or rhetorical means; on the contrary, it is the formal expression of the pragmatic structure of discourse proposition, which helps the speaker pass the propositional meaning of his utterance to the hearer more effectively. Information is the speaker's cognitive evaluation for the hearer in the specific context, which is the contribution to the hearer's knowledge-store through the propositional meaning of the utterance. The multi-perspective study of information structure provides a forceful evidence for the teaching of college English writing.The chief values of this thesis lie in the following two aspects:First, through the review of the theory of language information structure, this thesis clarifies the nature and representations of information structure, meanwhile, it elaborates topic/comment, theme/rheme and new/given and their difference and similarity of the three pair terminologies.Second, this thesis manages to explore four types of plausible writing methods related to information structure theory, and testify how they can be used to provide influence on students' writing by teachers.These approaches are:(i) Using information structure and highlighting information focus;(ii) Using theme progression model to arrange information;...