Prosodic Structure and the Given/New Distinction

Abstract

Over the last 15 years, since Halliday drew the attention of scholars in the West to the Prague School division of information within an information unit into given or new information, a considerable literature has developed. This literature has now largely obscured the phenomenon to which Halliday [1967 a] sought to draw attention. The aim of this contribution is to reassert Halliday’s basic distinction, to outline briefly how it relates to the plethora of other distinctions which have since been made in the literature, and to demonstrate from a limited corpus of data that Halliday’s simple dichotomous distinctions must be invoked to account for the range of intonational realisation in that data. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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