[4] Focus "indicates the presence of alternatives that are relevant for the interpretation of linguistic expressions", givenness indicates that "the denotation of an expression is present" in the immediate context of the utterance, and topic is "the entity that a speaker identifies, about which then information, the comment, is given".
[4] In the spoken form of English Language, one of the primary methods of indicating information structure is through intonation, whereby pitch is modified from some default pattern.
Cross-linguistically, word order variation (the so-called "inverted sentences") is one of the main syntactic devices used to convey specific information structure configurations, namely the presentational focus.
Cross-linguistically, there are clear tendencies that relate notions of information structure to particular linguistic phenomena.
[4] Focus is a grammatical category or attribute that determines indicating that part of an utterance contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive information.
[9] An alternative theory of focus would account for the stress pattern in the example from the previous section (When did Jane sell the book?
That the information structure of a clause is divided in this way is generally agreed on, but the boundary between topic/theme depends on grammatical theory.