The Architecture of I-Structure

In this paper, the inventory and the architecture of a separate i-structure representation in LFG is discussed in relation to Swedish data. It is argued that a discourse function SCENE needs to be distinguished from RHEME and GROUND. It furthermore proposed that a characteristic that singles out sentence adverbials from other clausal modifiers is their ability to function as focus operators (cf. Rooth 1992) and that FOCUS (as is ACTIVATION) is a discourse feature, separate from the discourse functions. The analysis builds on data from a corpus study of Swedish word order (Andréasson 2007) where the information dynamics of the sentence is found to be the key to explaining much of the possible word order variation.