Dictionaries, both print and digital, rely on type fonts, styles, and sizes to make hierarchies of information within entries clear to dictionary readers. This chapter introduces a doctrine of dictionary typology: The more information of different kinds that a dictionary entry attempts to convey or the more information that readers of a dictionary entry try to manage and absorb – including relations among types of information – the more typography assists in the organization and reception of that information. A corollary principle suggests that the relative value of information should be emphasized typographically, as well. Besides its role in conveying information structure, dictionary typography also contributes to the aesthetics of the dictionary page, along with space, lines, boxes, and pictures of various kinds. Finally, while sighted persons understand typography through the eyes, blind persons know it through their fingers and construe information hierarchies differently, as a result.

The author first defines the following notions of information structure: focus (vs. background), given (vs. new), and topic (vs. comment). He then goes on to show how these notions are reflected in the prosodic systems of Slavic languages. Focus in all Slavic languages is reflected in prosodic prominence governed by a stress-focus correspondence defined by the author. In general, ‘given’ is realized outside the sentence stress. Focus does not have an obligatory prosodic reflex in Slavic languages.

Slavic languages are notorious for rich inflectional systems, allowing substantial freedom in word order. Aside from SVO word order, canonical for the great majority of Slavic languages, orders with arguments surfacing in non-canonical positions are also allowed. We consider two such orders – OVS and OSV. The two orders stem from two different types of argument reordering with distinct syntactic, interpretive and prosodic properties. The first is linked to neutral prosody and is licenced by the object being construed as interpretively prominent compared to the subject. The object undergoing this type of reordering binds into the subject and takes scope over it. This reordering is possible only if the thematic prominence relations of arguments are identified by means other than their relative structural position. The second type is linked to marked prosody and is licenced by the displaced object being disambiguated as contrastive. In this type of reordering the object cannot bind into the subject or take scope over it. This type of reordering is possible only if the object carries a strong prosodic marker.

The theory of the nonprofit institutional form introduced by Henry Hansmann more than 40 years ago proposed that informational problems, specifically information asymmetry, explains the essential defining feature of the nonprofit organization – the so-called nondistribution constraint. While the conventional argument holds that an asymmetry of information arises due to intrinsic, hard-to-measure attributes of nonprofit outputs, this chapter argues instead that informational problems arise because private purchasers fail to sufficiently value the positive externalities of information. In short, information is a social good, rather than a private good, and neither purchasers (donors) nor producers (nonprofits) have sufficiently strong incentives to systematically incur the costs and risks associated with generating information. The undervaluing of information by private parties results in a symmetry of ignorance that may lead to “benefit failure” in the form of foregone social impact. This type of failure is induced by transaction, allocative, and production inefficiencies resulting from the symmetry of ignorance.

Chapter 11 opens by asking readers to imagine what different kinds of people likely know and don’t know. For example, everyone knows that things fall when you drop them. But details of social etiquette and childhood memories will vary across people. This exercise relates to the Maxim of Manner, which focuses on brevity, clarity, and orderliness for contributions to successful conversations. Information structure is central here: Learning is enhanced when learners meet given or familiar information before new or unfamiliar information. In other words, we build on what we already know. One reason that this point is critical to public engagement is that we compute meaning for words and sentences as we hear/read them. The Worked Example uses a demonstration in which we write people’s names in the International Phonetic Alphabet to compare two orders for presenting critical information. This chapter’s Closing Worksheet asks readers to write down an ideal interaction they want with the demonstrations they are developing and then to change the order of the elements around.

Chapter 15 opens by asking readers to work through a complex language analysis problem, where the solution requires figuring out what the component parts mean and then making new sentences with those parts. This exercise introduces the notion of scaffolding, which goes beyond the advice that given information should precede new information. The progression from one type of information to the other will likely involve multiple steps, and attention to the order of each step should ideally be audience specific. The chapter encourages readers to describe their topics with as much technical apparatus as they want and then to break their descriptions down as much as possible. An example with vowel formants is introduced, emphasizing links back to problems with jargon and to the idea that incomplete is not incorrect. The Worked Example describes scaffolding in the formant example for the levels of explanation one might use for a young child, an older child, a teenager, a college student, and someone with expertise in a language-related field. Technical terms, materials (such as videos, spectrogram-making programs, or diagrams), and take-home messages are modified accordingly.

This chapter introduces the theoretical constructs adopted by Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) in the treatment of information structure and addresses the question of the place of information structure in the architecture of grammar. It is claimed that RRG offers an approach to information structure which is flexible enough to capture the cross-linguistic variation in the role played by discourse in the semantics–syntax and syntax–semantics linking, while also being sufficiently constrained to make important generalizations on the expression of pragmatic states and pragmatic relations, and their interface with prosody, morphology and sentence structure.

This grammatical sketch explores sentence structure in Cheyenne/Tsêhésenêstsestôtse (Plains Algonquian, USA). We first describe the principal morphosyntactic features of Cheyenne and offer a brief account of grammatical phenomena that benefit from a Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) analysis: basic clause types, verb valence and transitivity, the marking of core arguments, argument-adjuncts and adjuncts, and the linking algorithm. This analysis shows that there is no evidence for the postulation of grammatical relations, save for a pragmatically influenced privileged syntactic argument, and supports the hierarchical scope order of operators postulated by RRG. We then illustrate the fundamental role of pragmatics in argument coding, macrorole assignment, and word order by examining the relationship of information structure with the reference-tracking system of obviation and the direct/inverse system. These systems work jointly with the Person and Semantic Function Hierarchies. Despite word order variability, it is possible to integrate information structure into clause structure and explore the intricate mechanism that accommodates semantic information into syntactic structure.

Chapter 9, the longest chapter, presents a step-by-step discussion of the OLG theory of syntax, focusing especially on issues of central concern to syntacticians: phrase structure, movement or filler-gap dependencies, and the architecture of grammar. A detailed walk-through of how to derive an English sentence is given, including formal definitions of syntactic features. Analyses of the range of typological variation observed in relevant word-order, case-marking and information-structural phenomena are presented from an OLG perspective, including detailed case studies of the Faroese clause structure facts presented in Chapter 2 and an in-depth treatment of object shift in Scandinavian languages. Ranking arguments, constraint definitions and factorial typologies are given where needed. Chapter 9 is intended to answer most of the major questions regarding how this theory handles a broader range of data.

Stage 6 of the journey addresses various aspects of how information is conveyed and organized in a sentence, beginning with the stubborn problems that led to the development of dynamic semantics (‘donkey sentences’ and cross-sentential anaphora), through properties of expressions that are used to refer (descriptions, proper names, indexical expressions), to the organization of information (presuppositions and projective content, topic, focus, coherence). As such, it is a step to the next stage that concerns utterance meaning.

Chapter 9 discusses the SO preference observed in the domain of language production, i.e., that sentences with SO orders are more frequently produced than sentences with OS orders in many languages. Although the language production mechanism is often assumed to be universal, the range of languages investigated so far is typologically quite limited. We conducted a sentence production experiment with a picture description task to clarify word order selection in Kaqchikel. In this experiment, participants verbally described the target pictures with a simple sentence. Speakers of Kaqchikel had a general preference for producing the SVO order over the VOS order. This is consistent with the prediction of the UCV, but not with that of the IGV. Therefore, the SO word order might be a universal preference in sentence production, which is in line with the results of previous studies.

This chapter presents the most influential linguistic approaches to presupposition. Going beyond the traditional analyses of the problem of presupposition projection, it also considers recent developments in linguistics that link the analysis of presuppositions to general processes of cognition and reasoning, such as attention, probabilistic reasoning, theory of mind, information structure, attitudes and perspectival structure. I discuss some outstanding questions: whether presuppositions form one coherent group or should be thought of as different types of phenomena, why we have presuppositions at all, and why we see the presuppositions that we see (aka the triggering problem). Overall, the chapter stresses the need to consider the intricacies of the interaction of presuppositions with the broader discourse context.

The canonical word order of Modern Chinese is SVO, and yet Modern Chinese does not demonstrate the patterns of a typical VO language. This chapter reviews representative arguments that have contributed to our closer understanding of what pragmatic and semantic factors condition word order variation in Modern Chinese. Discourse analyses in relation with information structure account for the pragmatic function of the preverbal object and why there is the relative ordering between subject and object in non-canonical SOV/OSV patterns, based on the notion of topicality, focus, and emphatic/contrastive function. Semantic accounts explain how the animacy of subject and object constrains the obligatory vs. optional ba marking of object in the SOV pattern and the acceptability of the OSV pattern. Finally, arguments based on iconicity principle and lexical aspect analyses are used to account for the relative ordering of verb and locative/temporal adverbials.