Informationsstruktur und Übersetzung

Abstract

The article deals with the role of the information structure in assertive utterances and shows, by means of several examples, which lexical and topological-syntactic means are used in German for the discourse function ‘focus’. In the contrastive part, the two languages German and French are compared with regard to the focusing function. Since they are topologically differently centered, they also use other structural or constructional means here: e.g. the fronting – retardation in German and the cleft sentences in French. In translation teaching, the information-structural criteria should be made clear and the corresponding differences between the languages explained in detail.