132304 VO Information Structure in Hungarian and in Finnish (2018W)

The aim of the course is to familiarize students with the possibilities of sentence structuring that serve the purpose of integrating sentences in the wider context (e.g. to match them to the speaker’s communicative aims and the hearer’s knowledge). These possibilities include, in the world’s languages, the choice of word order, intonation, or particular lexical expressions. In addition to the basics of the theory of information structure (givenness, topic-comment and focus-background division), the course concentrates on means of encoding information structural divisions in Hungarian and in Finnish, which differ in many respects from the relevant means available in German or English.