English text system and structure pdf

In linguistics , information structure , also called information packaging, describes the way in which information is formally packaged within a sentence. Other structures motivated by information structure include preposing e. The basic notions of information structure are focus , givenness , and topic , [2] as well as their complementary notions of background, newness, and comment respectively. The term information structure is due to Halliday In , Chafe introduced the term information packaging. Information structure can be realized through a wide variety of linguistic mechanisms.

The grammatical function or meaning of a sentence is dependent on this structural organization, which is also called syntax or syntactic structure. In traditional grammar, the four basic types of sentence structures are the simple sentence, the compound sentence, the complex sentence, and the compound-complex sentence. When reading a sentence, we generally expect the first noun to be the subject and the second noun to be the object. This expectation which isn't always fulfilled is known in linguistics as the " canonical sentence strategy. One of the first lessons learned by the student of language or linguistics is that there is more to language than a simple vocabulary list. To learn a language, we must also learn its principles of sentence structure, and a linguist who is studying a language will generally be more interested in the structural principles than in the vocabulary per se. The subject is a word or a group of words that functions as a noun; the predicate is at least a verb and possibly includes objects and modifiers of the verb.