The speaker has to organize and the listener has to identify the hierarchy of information units starting from the most prominent syllable in a word, the most prominent word in an intonation group, the varying prominence and the cohesion of intonation groups in longer utterances, such as speech paragraphs or the whole text. Pitch, length and loudness help to restore the key concepts of the situation posited in speech act, to get the structural vision of the speech act.
In a dialogue or polilogue the speaker – listener interaction is reflected in the unity of one topic for discussion shared by all the participants, with key words brought out by prosodic means, followed by special boundary tones, pitch range and tempo variation to signal transition to a new topic.
Information structuring is more evident in radio newsreading, sports commentary (changes in prosody reflect the progress of the action).
It is subdivided into:
a) constitutive function. It presupposes the integrative function on the one hand when intonation arranges intonation groups into bigger syntactic units: sentences, texts. If it were not for this function, we would hear separate words at the same pitch.
b) intergrative.
c) delimitative. It manifests itself when intonation divides texts, syntactic wholes and sentence units that is intonation groups.
ex. He ¢washed and ¢brushed his hair.
He -> washed and brushed his hair.