Focus - Background

Background

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English - Pedagogy, Didactics, Literature Studies, grade: 2.2 (B), Technical University of Braunschweig, course: Information Structure: The Interface of Syntax, Pragmatics and Phonology, 5 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Language is and has always been the most important means of communication. We exchange information by talking or writing to each other; we read books, magazines, newspapers or any kind of written text either for personal entertainment or reading for intensive studies to find out what is going on. For my responsible future work as a teacher in primary schools it is very important and interesting for me to analyse and understand the structure of language. Therefore, I need as well a background knowledge about Information Structure in order to be able to give for example adequate answers to the pupils' questions concerning sentence structures. The course'Information Structure: The Interface of Syntax, Pragmatics, and Phonology' helped me to appreciate this topic better. 'Information Structure means the division or organisation of the sentence/utterance and its elements according to the discourse situation.' (Dr. Nicole Dehé 2003) A typical situation is for example an interview or a conversation. There must be more than one speaker because 'Information Structure reflects the relationship between the speaker's assumption about the hearer's state of knowledge and consciousness at the time of an utterance and the formal structure of the sentence.' (Dr. Nicole Dehé 2003) According to this defintion there must be at least one hearer and one speaker. Information Structure sentences can be analysed in terms of 'information packaging'1 such as theme, rheme, topic, comment, focus, background, dominance, ground (link, tail), given and new. This term paper highlights the catagory focus - background. In the first part I will give a short overview of the catagories and explain them in the following way: Firstly I will give a short definition of the category, then I will give one or two examples and at the end I will discuss possible problems. Then I will have a closer look at the focus - background topic. After that I will analyse the interview with Bryan Adams basing on the catagory focus - background. Finally a brief summary about this term paper will be given. 1 'I have been using the term packaging to refer to the kind of phenomena at issue here, with the idea that they have to do primarily with how the message is sent and only secondarily with the message itself, just as the packaging of toothpaste can affect sales in partial independence of the quality of the toothpaste inside.' (Wallace Chafe:28)