Information structure in Romanian utterances with contrast relations

The paper presents information packaging structures in Romanian utterances with the contrast relation, by decomposing them into hierarchies of embedded communicative units. At any level of the hierarchy, communicative units are structured by two or three functional constituents each of them having text and melodic contour. Communicative unit constituents are functional elements at the information structure level produced by their corresponding F0 patterns. The new account of information structure consists in working with two independent levels: the topic-focus and the referential information structures. Romanian sentences with contrast relation are discussed in the paper by presenting the influence of different discourse contexts on the communicative organization of the related utterances.