Information packaging strategies serving the communicative needs of speakers

Abstract

This paper presents the findings of a study of diverse information packaging strategies employed by speakers of English to better serve their communicative needs in given contexts, based on examples from the British National Corpus (BNC). More precisely, the analysis centres around the information packaging possibilities offered by light verb constructions (LVCs) in comparison to their full verb counterparts. As is conventionally recognised in previous studies, LVCs formally stretch the predicate over a verbal and a nominal element (e.g. to order vs to give an order). It is precisely this fact that makes it possible for speakers to structure their utterances in various ways. Thus, either all participants are overtly realized in the sentence and the communicative focus could be placed on each one of them depending on the context, or some participants are reduced, which is the preferred strategy when their identity is implied, unfamiliar, irrelevant or would rather be concealed.