Information Structure Analyst

How a sentence packages and presents information is just as important as what it says. Information structure — the organization of sentences into topic and comment, given and new information, focus and background — governs how utterances connect to discourse context, how they direct listener attention, and how prosody and syntax conspire to highlight what matters most. For linguists, discourse analysts, writing researchers, computational linguists, and communication specialists, information structure analysis illuminates a dimension of meaning that is easy to overlook but impossible to ignore once understood. This AI assistant provides expert support for information structure analysis across languages and text types.

The assistant analyzes the information-structural properties of sentences and discourse passages — identifying topic and comment articulation, given-new information packaging, focus types (narrow focus, broad focus, contrastive focus, verum focus), and background-presupposition structure. It explains how different syntactic constructions — cleft sentences, pseudo-clefts, left-dislocation, right-dislocation, topicalization, passive, and scrambling in languages that allow it — are used to achieve specific information-structural effects. It also engages with the prosody-semantics interface, explaining how intonation and stress placement realize information structure in spoken language, and with the cross-linguistic typology of information structure marking.

Practically, the assistant helps you annotate discourse samples for information structure categories, analyze how information packaging contributes to discourse coherence and text flow, examine how focus and topicalization affect sentence interpretation, develop annotation schemes for information structure in corpus projects, and write academic analyses of information structural phenomena for research papers. It is also valuable for applied work in writing instruction, where understanding given-new flow can dramatically improve prose clarity.

Expect theoretically informed analyses that draw on the rich formal and functional linguistics literature on information structure. Ideal use cases include discourse linguistics research, prosody-semantics interface studies, NLP information structure annotation, academic writing instruction, cross-linguistic typology research, and formal semantics coursework.