This article takes stock of the basic notions of Information Structure (IS). It first provides a
general characterization of IS—following Chafe (1976)—within a communicative model of …

Sense and Sensitivity advances a novel research proposal in the nascent field of formal
pragmatics, exploring in detail the semantics and pragmatics of focus in natural language …

The paper provides a semantic analysis of intervention effects in wh-questions. The
interpretation component of the grammar derives uninterpretability, hence ungrammaticality …

This paper argues that the common denominator of topic–comment (TC) constructions in
natural languages is not a single functional feature (eg aboutness) but rather the fact that …

This book explores the semantic and pragmatic mechanisms underlying grammaticalization.
Regine Eckardt argues that language change frequently involves a structural reorganization …

This dissertation develops a theory of contrastive topics (CTs)—what they mean, and how
they are realized. I give a compositional semantics for CT constructions, built on the idea that …

This article demonstrates that the most common prosodic realization of focus can be
subsumed typologically under the notion of alignment: a focused constituent is preferably …

The function of focus is to activate a set of alternatives, providing the locus for focus‐
sensitive particles like only. In the past decade, psycholinguistic research has shown that …

Some presuppositions are easier to cancel than others in embedded contexts. This contrast
has been used as evidence for distinguishing two fundamentally different kinds of …

Information Structure, the packaging of information to satisfy the immediate communicative
needs, exerts a powerful force on all structural levels of language. We show how this …