The Main Devices of Foregrounding in the Information Structure of Georgian Sentences

Abstract

Structuring of information proceeds through the foregrounding of certain parts of the information. In general, foregrounding can be realized on various linguistic levels and it is possible to distinguish: Conceptual,Functional, Discourse and Pragmatic devices, which can be represented by various formal means: Phonetic-Phonological, Morphological-Syntactic and Lexical-Pragmatic. All the devices can co-occur during the information packaging. Some of them are obligatory and are on the high level of the hierarchically organized processes of foregrounding (e.g. conceptual or functional foregrounding); some of them are optional and they are defined by the specific discourse and/or pragmatic values of a sentence (e.g. focus or topic); some forms of foregrounding are implicational (e.g. sometimes reordering implies emphasis of intonation) and so on. The relations between the different kinds of foregrounding are language specific, but it seems possible to speak about universal models of formalization of the information structures. In Georgian there is no morphological topic marker, but all other devices of foregrounding are possible. The paper examines the main models of such devices.

This work was fulfilled within the Potsdam Project D2: “Information Structure of a sentence”.