The History of Sentence Information Structure Studies in the Modern Mongolian Language

The article summarizes results achieved by scholars representing different generations and linguistic traditions in studies of Mongolian sentence information structure. The notion of information structure was introduced by M. A. K. Halliday on the grounds of V. Mathesius’s theory of “the actual division of the sentence” (or “thematic-rhematic articulation of the sentence”), but the former developed his own view on this issue. The principal distinction between these two theories is that M. Halliday treats such entities as givenness, focus, topic, etc. as matters of individual cognitive process, whereas V. Mathesius considers them to depend mainly on context and “consituation”. Currently, M. A. K. Halliday’s information structure theory is deemed to be more consistent and, therefore, referred to more frequently. Nevertheless, back in the 1980s when first articles on Mongolian sentence information structure started to appear the views of the Prague Linguistic Circle were more widely accepted among Soviet specialists in Mongolian studies, and the pioneer works on information structure of a Mongolian sentence were written in the mould of structuralism. The first papers written on the subject belonged to Moscow and Leningrad scholars Z. K. Kas’yanenko (1973), M. N. Orlovskaya (1984), Z. V. Shevernina (1984), and the American linguist L. B. Hammar (Indiana University Bloomington) who had presented her Ph. D. thesis under the title “Syntactic and Pragmatic Options in Mongolian: a Study of Bol and N” (1983). Those works by the afore-mentioned linguists mostly concerned word order in a Mongolian sentence from the perspective of the “actual division”, and special particles, which are viewed in modern linguistics as topic, focus, verification, and emphasis markers. A couple of decades later, Mongolian scholars attempted to describe their native language in terms of the latest trends of the world linguistics and their works - those by M. Bazarragcha, Z. Guliranz, G. Jambalsuren, B. Purev-Ochir - have become a valuable source of examples, showing various types of structures, such as thetic sentences, sentences with preposition of rheme and so on. Lately several works on intonation in the contemporary Mongolian language have been published. However, unfortunately, one can hardly find any comprehensive study of the relation between information structure and intonation in modern Mongolian. This subject is likely to be a fruitful field for further research.

Mongolian language, information structure, history, theme, rheme, particles, intonation, word order

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