Abstract
The paper presents the emerging alternative to the field of Information Structure, termed here Multifactorial Information Management (MIM). This framework regards the process of information structuring as an interplay of diverse language-specific categories and discourse strategies, belonging to various areas of linguistic inquiry. The paper illustrates the application of this approach to cross-linguistic findings and suggests perspectives for future research. It also demonstrates how a multifactorial approach to information management eliminates the need for idiosyncratic concepts such as topic, focus and dedicated cognitive models associated with them.
Acknowledgment
I thank Masha Khachaturyan, Shahar Shirtz, and two anonymous reviewers for their detailed feedback, comments and suggestions on previous versions of this paper.
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Supplementary Material
The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2020-0039).
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