COMMONSENSE DEFAULT EMPHASIS -

Every sentence contains multiple items, which make up the total information to be conveyed to the listener. But some item is “critical”. Critical because that is the end-point, or the bottomline amongst the information that the speaker wants to convey. For example, when someone says the sentence – ‘water bodies on maps are shown in blue’, it appeals to us via commonsense that the most important thing which he wants to convey is ‘BLUE’. That’s the endpoint emphasis. Of course he wants to talk ABOUT water bodies and talk WITH REFERENCE TO maps. But somehow it is clear to us that the intended point of the sentence is ‘blue’ – that they are shown in blue. Consider another sentence – John is the culprit. Here it appears that people were trying to identify who is the culprit and this information came from somewhere/someone that John is the one. So the intended point of information in this sentence is ‘JOHN’. This point is also important in the cognitive regard because more often than not, this intended point is the point from where the thought occurred/began in the mind which later became the expressed given sentence. ‘John’ struck someone (in the thought) as the answer to the mystery of who is the culprit, and he later expressed the sentence – John is the culprit. This is the commonsense story behind the sentence. Another point here is that we involuntarily imagine contexts from sentences. This imagined context is principally inspired from this intended point of information. For example, if you hear -John sat on the office chair for the first time, the intended point of information that you automatically sense is ‘the first time’ (and very close in importance comes the part ‘office chair’) which makes up build up a background/context that John is appointed to some new position/post and today is the beginning. So we see three concepts about a sentence, intertwined here – the intended point of information, which is related to (inspires) the imagined context of the occurrence of the speech by the listener and the inception of the thought in the speaker’s mind which was later converted into the spoken sentence.