Information structure and the status of NP in Russian

This paper investigates the role of the information structure in the interpretation of nominal elements in Russian. More specifically, it concentrates on the correlations between the position an NP occupies within a sentence and its reading with respect to (in)definiteness. To this end, different ways of indicating (in)definiteness in this language are discussed. Russian, as a language lacking articles, has an option of denoting this feature overtly (lexically or morphosyntactically); alternatively, an NP may remain unspecified. It is proposed that, in the latter case, the interpretation depends on the role the NP has in the discourse (or information) structure. The paper further examines the information packaging of Russian clauses. It is concluded that the appropriate representation of a sentence in this language consists of three parts: optional Topic (s) and Neutral Information and obligatory New Information Focus in a neutral intonation sentence of Contrastive Focus (1992) and King (1995), is contrasted the traditional two-way division into Topic and Focus or Theme and Rheme. Finally, the paper looks at the possible types of NPs representing various functions of information structure. It is shown that neither definiteness nor the related feature of specificity may provide a one-to-one correspondence. It is then demonstrated that the feature underlying the dependence between the interpretation of NP and its role in the information structure is D(iscourse)-linking (Pesetsky 1787).