Abstract

Utterances are planned and realized incrementally. Which information is salient or attended to prior to initiating an utterance has influences on choices in argument structure and word order, and affects the prosodic prominence of the constituents involved. Many phenomena that the linguistic literature usually treats as reflexes of the grammatical encoding of information structure, such as the early ordering of topics, or the prosodic reduction of old information, are treated in the production literature as a consequence of how contextual salience interacts with production planning. This article reviews information structural effects that arise as a consequence of how syntactic and phonological information is incrementally encoded in the production process, and how we can tell these effects apart from grammatically encoded aspects of information structure that form part of the message.