Abstract

Two issues relevant to discourse description and analysis are discussed, namely which property of the sentence structure reflects its discourse anchoring, and how to combine the ‘dynamic’ view of language and discourse with the description of sentence syntax. To this aim, our approach to the information structure of the sentence is briefly summarized, introducing then the notion of the hierarchy of activation of the elements of the stock of knowledge assumed by the speaker to be shared by him and the hearer and proposing some heuristics guiding the development of the activation degrees. These heuristics are applied to a piece of text discussing certain implications of the proposed analysis and some related problems, and briefly sketching a possibility of how to test the proposed approach to text analysis on a large annotated corpus of texts.