Questions: Information Structure: Focus and Topic

Question 1

Someone asks: 'What did Sarah win?' Which response has the correct information structure for this context?

• A. SARAH won the prize (stress on Sarah)
• B. Sarah won THE PRIZE (stress on prize)
• C. Sarah WON the prize (stress on won)
• D. It was Sarah who won the prize

Answer: (B)

The question 'What did Sarah win?' presupposes Sarah won something and asks for the identity of the thing won. The focus — the new, salient information — must be the prize. 'Sarah won THE PRIZE' places nuclear stress on 'prize,' correctly marking it as focus. Option A (stress on Sarah) would be the right answer to 'Who won the prize?' — it makes Sarah the focus, but Sarah is already given information in this context. Option C makes the act of winning the focus, which is also given. Option D (cleft construction) emphasizes Sarah as focus, again a mismatch. Focus placement must match what the preceding question left open.

Question 2

A speaker says 'It was SARAH who won the prize' in response to a yes/no question: 'Did Sarah win the prize?' Why is this response infelicitous despite being true?

• A. The cleft construction is too formal for casual conversation
• B. The cleft construction presupposes that the identity of the winner was in question, but the yes/no question only asked whether Sarah won — creating a presupposition mismatch
• C. The speaker should have said 'Yes, Sarah won' because cleft constructions always introduce new information
• D. Cleft constructions cannot follow yes/no questions in English grammar

Answer: (B)

Cleft constructions ('It was X who...') carry an existence presupposition — they presuppose that someone won the prize and identify who. Using a cleft in response to 'Did Sarah win?' implies there was uncertainty about *who* won, when the actual question was only whether *Sarah* won. This is a presupposition mismatch: the cleft introduces information structure incompatible with the discourse context established by the yes/no question. The sentence is true but pragmatically infelicitous — it violates the expectation that information packaging matches what the discourse has left open.

Question 3

Information structure is purely a pragmatic phenomenon — it affects how utterances are interpreted in context but has no grammatical reflexes in syntax or morphology.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

This is the key misconception the topic addresses. Information structure has grammatical reflexes across languages: English uses prosodic stress and cleft constructions ('It was X who...', 'What X did was...'); Czech and other Slavic languages use systematic word order (given information toward the front, new toward the back, independent of grammatical subject/object); Somali and many African languages use morphological focus particles; Japanese uses the topic particle *wa*. These are not stylistic options but grammatical mechanisms that reflect information structure. The theoretical significance is that information structure sits at the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface, not purely in pragmatics.

Question 4

Two sentences with identical truth conditions but different focus placement can be felicitous or infelicitous depending on the preceding discourse context.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

This is the core insight: information structure is about how a sentence *packages* information relative to the discourse, not what it *says* about the world. 'SARAH won the prize' and 'Sarah won THE PRIZE' are true in exactly the same worlds — they have identical truth conditions. But the first is a natural answer to 'Who won the prize?' while the second is a natural answer to 'What did Sarah win?' Using the wrong one produces pragmatic oddness even though you haven't said anything false. This demonstrates that information structure is a genuine dimension of linguistic meaning independent of truth-conditional content.

Question 5

Explain what the 'question test' reveals about information structure, and why a mismatch between focus placement and the preceding question produces pragmatic oddness even when the sentence is true.

Model answer: The question test diagnoses focus by finding which question the sentence constitutes a felicitous answer to — focus is the part of the sentence that provides the new information the question left open. For example, 'Sarah won THE PRIZE' answers 'What did Sarah win?'; 'SARAH won the prize' answers 'Who won the prize?'. When focus mismatches the preceding question, the sentence provides information at the wrong level of given/new packaging: it either presents given information as if it were new, or presents new information in a position that signals it is given. This violates the conversational expectation that speakers package information so that what is already established appears as topic and what is genuinely new appears as focus. The sentence remains true but fails to be a coherent discourse move.

The question test works because questions make explicit what information is open — they are a tool for identifying the given/new partition. A felicitous answer must address exactly what the question asked, with focus on the answering constituent. Mismatches can arise from presupposition failures (cleft used when identity wasn't in question), accent in the wrong place (old information stressed), or topic-comment reversal (responding about a different entity than was asked about). Each produces a different flavor of pragmatic oddness, but all stem from misalignment between the information structure of the utterance and the discourse context.