Universals of information structure

We discuss universal principles of information structure under the hypothesis that these can only be found in the interaction between the morpho-syntactic organization of languages and the discourse grammar properties according to which utterances are built in a language. We first discuss language-specific ways of building sentence structure. This leads us to take into account the range of syntactic and morphological variation. We then proceed to single out the kinds of pragmatic principles associated with the organization of utterances in the different languages. From this it emerges that basically languages are either syntactically or pragmatically organized, in other words they either belong to those in which syntactic order shows a correspondence between the grammatical relations and the given – new information structure sequence, or to those in which there is no correspondence in that utterances are simply pragmatically based sequences.