THE DISTRIBUTION AND
FOCUS OF INFORMATION
SUMMARY
1 In order to be understood, messages are divided into chunks called information units, which are represented in speech by tone units. These do not correspond to any one grammatical category, since the speaker is free to break up the message as desired into units which are smaller or larger than a clause.
2 Each tone unit contains a tonic syllable, which represents the highest point of the focus of information. Information focus extends to the syntactic unit in which the tonic occurs.
3 The tone unit in English signals the distribution of information into Given and New. Each information unit contains an obligatory New element and, optionally, a Given element, the unmarked order being Given–New. The Given is the information that the speaker presents as recoverable by the hearer; the New is the information that is presented as not recoverable by the hearer.
4 The devices of ellipsis and substitution are used to avoid repeating information that is recoverable.
5 Unmarked focus falls on the last non-anaphoric lexical item of the information unit. If the intonation nucleus is made to fall on some other item, it is marked and unequivocally represents New information. This is marked focus. Its function is to contrast one item with another or to add emotive coloring to the utterance. Focus can coincide with marked Theme and is a cohesive device in texts.
