Information structure as parallel tree building

Information Structure (IS) can be seen as a separate component of grammar (see Vallduvi 1990, Vallduvi and Engdahl 1996, Eilam 2011, and others), which determines how information is assimilated into a hearer’s knowledge store, and which mediates syntax and phonology. Such accounts take the focus-ground distinction to be the most basic distinction made by IS. In contrast, analyses such as that of Rooth (1992) treat focus as a syntactic feature that is interpreted by the semantic component of grammar, and which may have phonological consequences. Accounts like Rooth’s give focus a privileged status, capturing the intuition that focused material uniquely serves to answer the question under discussion. In this paper we propose an account that, like Vallduvi and others, takes focus and ground to be primitive elements of an informational component, but which gives focus the unique property of receiving a pragmatically determined interpretation.