Narrative

"Information structure is concerned both with ‘mental states’ of speakers and hearers and with linguistic means used to convey these mental states. In other words, the linguist interested in information structure (IS), deals simultaneously with formal and communicative aspects of language. The main contrasts concern ‘new’, ‘accessible’ and ‘given’, as well as ‘topic’, focus,’ and ‘background’". (Skopeteas et al., 2006: 1)

"In the nature of our design, and our discussion, we rely heavily on Talmy's (1985) notion of lexicalization patterns, in particular his cross-linguistic discussion of systems of motion description. We are interested, for instance, in patterns of semantic conflation (that is, what other semantic information besides 'motion' may be encoded in a verb root) and patterns of semantic distribution (that is, what types of information are encoded in the different morphemes that come together to build a description of a motion event)." (Wilkins et al., 1998: 1).

 ''A questionnaire primarily designed for grammar-writing, but with useful structural questions that should be addressed in the field; the Lingua Questionnaire underlies the North Holland/Croom Helm/Routledge Descriptive grammar series. This questionnaire provides the basic questions for the description of many of the constructions found in human language. A large number of grammars have been written based on the questionnaire.

"A six-minute film that was produced at the University of California at Berkeley in 1975 and shown to speakers of a number of languages, who were asked to tell what happened in it. In the meantime it has been used in a variety of other studies across other languages". (Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara; http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/research/pear-film)

"''This manual attempts to make a contribution to the solution of several problems in the area of descriptive linguistic field-work, namely, those problems arising out of the need for accepted standards for the gathering, recording and reporting of linguistic data collected in the field.

Evidence that these poblems were more than a personal concern was given in New York City at the 1954 Annual Meetings of the Modern Language Association, where the author chaired a conference of Scholars held for the purpose of reviewing the current situation.