한국어, 영어, 스페인어, 러시아어에 나타난 초점구조와 정보분절성

This paper aims at revisiting the information structure of sentences in languages such as Korean, English, Spanish and Russian. For this purpose, we refered to three types of focus structure, suggested by Lambrecht (1994), which include predicate-focus, argument-focus and sentence-focus structures. The information structure can be represented by the categorical statement and the thetic statement. The first is divided into two information segments&#8212; <topic> and <comment>, which typically corresponds to predicate-focus structure, while the second can not be divided but constitutes only one unit <comment>, which represents the sentence-focus structure. Given that the existence of topic is the factor of determining categorical/thetic statements, there ll be possibility of interpreting certain argument-focus structures as secondary thetic sentences and of considering some of Lambrecht s thetic structures as categorical sentences. On the other hand, the linguistic ways to realize the information division vary across languages, even if they are commonly available in affirming or negating the existence of ‘topic’.