A Study Of Information Structure And Effective Communication

The field of intercultural communication should benefit from the continuing development of different theoretical approaches. Communication, as an independent field of studies, is deemed to be a most controversial and complicated subject that is interwoven with many other fields. Confronted with such a complexion, communication cannot be studied satisfactorily and adequately without the assistance of other relevant fields or subjects. As the purpose of communication, information plays an important role in the studies on communication. Large numbers of linguists and scholars who specialize in information structure, communication and intercultural communication have ever implemented a large quantity of studies on different aspects. In recent years, the studies on information structure have been extended from the information science to the linguistic research, and from the linguistic research to the communication theory. All these aspects could be seen as important factors which could influence human communication. Albert Mehrabian(1967), currently Professor Emeritus of psychology, based on the study of information transmitted during the communication, concluded such a rule: the meaning of a message is communicated by: your words7% +your tone of voice 38% + your body language55%. The result shows that the effectiveness of language in communication does not play a significant role, therefore, which is greatly vital to conduct an investigation into the important aspects which are associated with communication in order to gain a comparatively full picture of communication process. In this thesis, we try to study the influence between information structure and all these factors of language in human communication, in order to convey the important influence between them.This thesis is a comprehensive attempt to approach communication effectiveness in terms of information structure, which is associated with the division of Given/New information, the Communicative Dynamism(CD) in Functional Sentence Perspective(FSP) and theme/rheme information structure in Systematic Functional Grammar, and then to analyze the intonation structure and sentence structure from a communicative functional perspective. At the same time, we sketch information theory of Shannon’s and Chafe’s etc., and how the studies on information structure have been extended from the information science to the linguistic research, and from the linguistic research to the communication theory. Based on the information theory, we analyze the intonation structure and sentence structure from a communicative functional perspective, especially we analyze the information distribution of there-sentences in postposing, which causes effective and improper influence on effective communication, and we also using CD analyzed the different information distribution in there-sentences causing different communication effect. We reveal that information, like the language, has the deep structure and surface structure, deep and surface information related to human cognition and human language structures, respectively.This thesis has certain theoretical significance and practical significance. Theory: this thesis broadens the research scope of the information theory and effective communication by applying the information structure to the analysis to the human communication language. Practices: this thesis can help us achieve the purpose of improving the effectiveness of our daily communication, such as business, teaching, etc. by consciously using language information processing.