Structural Properties of Information Packaging in German and in Universal Grammar

Mais quel'qu'un troubla la fête (La Fontaine) Werner Abraham Groningen 1. Purpose and overview This article aims at defining in structural terms what have been called theme and rheme in the traditions of German linguistics and general functional linguistics, of the Praguean pronunciation as well as other. The fundamental idea is to describe in formal ways a general mapping device between the sentential functions of focus and presupposition and the discourse functions of rheme and theme. For this link to be meaningful it is necessary to define sentential focus and presupposition in general and formal terms of sentential structure. This will be achieved by what will be called the Null Hypothesis of accent prominence. The general idea embodied in this hypothesis is that every declarative sentence has a speicifc grammatical, i.e. unmarked or neutral, distribution of structurally defined focal accent. The Null Hypothesis borrowed from Cinque (1990) boils down to the claim that the most prominent sentential accent assigned for textually neutral single sentences is carried by the head of the deepest embedded node in sentential structure (in terms of the syntactic (sentential) represention in Chomsky 1981, 1986). In the present article, this claim will mainly be substantiated for German. Further, it will be shown to what extent the packaging of discourse and text information is a function of the Null Hypothesis and in which sense it is derivable. 1 Since the prediction about the position of sentential focal prominence will be made solely in general structural terms the claim bears some universal quality. Cross-linguistic parametrization may be seen to lie in the various ways single languages permit different mappings of the rheme prominence under discourse conditions onto the sentential structure, most prominently movement and whether or not refocussing effects take place. A limited portion of discussion will be devoted to this aspect in the last section, 5. Section 2 draws the necessary terminological distinctions. Section 3 contains the central claims with respect to the Null Hypothesis.

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