Relationship Between Discourse Notions and the Lexicon: From the Perspective of Chinese Information Structure

摘要

This paper investigates the properties of information structure (IS), focusing on the relationship between the discourse notions (i.e. topic and focus) and the lexicon. The feature-based approach suggests that topic and focus are formal features which are numerated from the lexicon, active in the computational system and encoded in syntax. However, this approach has received some criticisms regarding the generation of IS, such as the violation of the inclu-siveness condition, the employment of the "look-ahead" technique, the neglect of discourse pragmatic properties of topic/focus and the exclusion of the non-configurational IS. The key issue is that the semantic-syntactic properties of the lexical items in IS are relevant to the lexicon, but the pragmatic properties of IS are determined by factors out of the lexicon. IS should not be the result of pure syntactic computation, but a phenomenon of syntactic-pragmatic interface.