Cognitive strategies of discourse. Twenty years after

This paper is aimed at the analysis of the communicative (in the
terms of “theme vs. rheme”) and information (in the terms of “given vs. new”)
structures of a sentence. The communicative and information structures are,
in their turn, the main means of cognitive structuring information by the speaker
in the process of text generation. The material of the analysis are the Russian
sentences with the new information placed sentence-initially (Rus. Красный
автомобиль вылетел из-за поворота, lit. ‘A red car flew out from the corner’).
The new information placed sentence-initially reflects a specific literary technique
widely employed by Pushkin, L. Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Babel. The basic
Russian word order, however, mirrors the train of thought not from the new to
the given, but from the given to the new. The basic word order in such sentences
is, thus, like the following: Из-за поворота вылетел красный автомобиль
(‘From the corner there flew out a red car’). A question then arises as to whether
the “sentence-initial new” is being voiced over – when being read by the reader
– with the prosody of the theme or with the prosody of the rheme? The instrumental
analysis of the data taken from the minor working corpus of sounding
texts of the Russian Classics voiced over by the best actors allows reconstructing
the prosodic and, therefore, the communicative structures of a sentence with
the new information placed sentence-initially. The software programs Praat and
Speech Analyzer have been used in the process of analyzing the sounding data.
The results presented here are exemplified by the tracings of the communicatively
relevant movements of the reader’s voice frequency. The result of the
analysis is a full paradigm of the communicative structures which are realized
in the sentences with the new information placed sentence-initially, together
with the description of the consistent cognitive strategies of information structuring
within the process of reading.