On The Dual System Of Information Structure And Its Constraints On English Syntactic Structures

The information rationale for the construction of English syntactic structures should be explored from two perspectives: language system and cognitive system.The general requirement from the two systems for the information structure is to conform to the cognitive law of the given information before the new information,that is,the principle of end-focus.The language system mentioned in this paper includes not only the rule system that governs the building of the static syntactic structure,but also the rule system that restricts the building of the syntactic structure within a given context.The cognitive system refers to all the background information and knowledge accumulation contained in the human brain.Both of the two systems have a certain restrictive effect on the English syntax,which can either directly affect the establishment of the syntactic structure itself or its rhetorical effect in a certain context.In the language system,the manifestations of given information include repetition,substitution and rephrasing,which embody the overt characteristics of the given information.In the cognitive system,the criteria to judge the information category include the speaker's familiarity with the information,its relevance with the given information in the language system,the speaker's degree of control over the entity represented by the information,and its degree of movement.The higher the degree,the more likely it is to become given information.Among the above four factors,the second one is mainly reflected by semantic implication and contextual implication,which embody the covert characteristics of the given information.In most cases,the information structure in the language system is the projection of the corresponding information structure from the cognitive system to the language system.However,in the above two systems,the judgment of given information and new information can be inconsistent.In other words,in some cases,the given information in the cognitive system can be used as new information in the language system.The most typical example is the English comparative sentence.Conversely,the formally new information may also be turned into the given information in the cognitive system,and thus be projected to the language system as given information that appears at the beginning of a sentence.Finally,the dissertation elaborates the concrete expressions of the constraints of information structure on English syntactic structures.From a static point of view,due to the constraints of information structure,there can arise some English syntactic structures that seem theoretically well-formed but actually ill-formed;this is mainly caused by the failure to form an isomorphic relation between the information distribution in such kind of syntactic structures and the conventional distribution of information structure in the cognitive system.From a dynamic point of view,some English sentences are syntactically well-formed but rhetorically undesirable,the reason being that their use is quite unlikely to achieve good cohesion and coherence in discourse.In addition,certain syntactic structures can also be found which violate the cognitive law but are syntactically and rhetorically acceptable;this mostly results from the internal prescriptiveness of those structures or the principle of economy in language communication.The main innovation points of the dissertation are as follows: firstly,it puts forward the dual system for understanding information structure scientifically,namely,the language system and the cognitive system,and then it illustrates that the given information in the cognitive system can be used as new information in the language system under certain conditions;finally,the dissertation explores the constraints of information structure on English syntactic structures in the dynamic language use as well as in the static syntactic construction.