On Information Structure and Focus Structure in Narrative Discourses

This paper attempts to propose information structure and focus structure in narrative discourse.Based on systematic functional linguistics study on information structure which is related to sentence components,the author proposes the hypotheses as follows: information structure in narrative discourse comprises of micro-information structure and macro-information structure.The micro-information structure consists of narrative units and relations between constituents in narrative units,that is,setting,events and character's reactions;macro-information structure consists of five basic constituents in narrative structure,which is generalized as spatio-temporal chains,events chains,character chains and reaction chains.The hypothesis of f-structure in narrative discourse is founded on Asher's A Discourse based Theory of Focus Interpretation.At the level of structure,focus structure is interpreted as combination of marked information structure and specially constructed narrative structure;at the level of semantics,f-structure is interpreted basically by the relations of parallel and contrast.