Introduction

Abstract

Every meaningful message contains new information, or at least information meant by the speaker to be new for the listener, embedded in old information. Every message aims at communicating something new. The phrase two and two is four would be meaningless at this point, because it contains only old information, and nothing new is communicated. On the other hand, a sentence that contains only new information, e.g., suddenly he got extremely angry cannot be understood, it cannot be assimilated to previous knowledge. The quite normal sentence I met your brother yesterday contains as new information that a particular meeting has taken place at a particular moment. There is also old information: knowledge shared by the speaker and listener which is presupposed to be true. That presupposed information in this case is, among others: the listener has a brother. A linguist who has studied verbal communication and semantics in the framework of old and new information is CHAFE (1970, 1972). Related distinctions are topic and comment, given and new, theme and rheme (HALLIDAY, 1967, 1970), presupposition and focus (CHOMSKY, 1971).