The Functional/Cognitive Principle of Information Structure in Texts: Discourse Pressures and Syntactic Devices for English as L2 Learners

Abstract

(HALLIDAY 1985; CHAFE 1995 STUDY OVERVIEWThis paper aims at presenting the results of a research carried out with the objective of investigating whether learners of English as a second language recognized, implicitly and/or explicitly, the existence of the functional/cognitive principle of information distribution in texts. The research also checked the mastering, by these students, of a few syntactic devices related to the information and thematic structures, which are used to meet communicative demands. All this process reflects the relation between language and cognition through processes of attention and focus.We checked how equipped students are to meet discourse communicative demands by making contextually adequate syntactic arrangements in clauses. We also focused on the issue of how conscious learners are of the fact that there is an information structure, which involves the concepts of old and new information, as well as there is a thematic structure, encompassing the concepts of theme and rheme in texts.