A dual pathway analysis of information structure

Abstract This article examines information structure from the point of view of language comprehension. It is argued that correct information structural properties of a discourse-configurational language can be calculated and thus correctly predicted from a formal model if it is assumed that there are two separate processing pathways dealing with linguistic input: (1) a pragmatic, extralinguistic and attention-based psychological module processing linguistic information as a general cognitive-communicative phenomenon and (2) a syntactic system utilizing grammaticalized discourse features and operator-variable computations that rely on a logico-grammatical notion of propositional scope. The output of the latter outperforms the output from the former. The model is applied to Finnish, a well-known discourse-configurational language. Convergence of psycholinguistic and linguistic approaches to language is seen as a potentially promising research avenue.