Linguistic Markers of Information Structure in Latvian

The article gives analysis of two levels of the information structure: the topic – focus structure and the giveness (given – new information) in literary-colloquial speech. Studying these levels attention has been drawn to formal indicators: nominal phrases explicitly expressing the category of definiteness, anaphoric pronouns as well as the indirect order of the subject, predicate and object. Presuming that the topic is the starting point of an utterance, or that part of its meaning of which the message bears a certain idea, as well as the fact that it is usually before the focus, analysis is given as to what parts of a sentence can form the topic. The attention has also been drawn to how the topic – focus structure is influenced by the opposition given – new partition