In discourse

Discourse

Discourse generally refers to "written or spoken communication". The following are three more specific definitions:...

-based grammatical theory, information flow is any tracking of referential

Reference

Reference is derived from Middle English referren, from Middle French rèférer, from Latin referre, "to carry back", formed from the prefix re- and ferre, "to bear"...

 information by speakers. Information may be new, just introduced into the conversation; given, already active in the speakers' consciousness; or old, no longer active. The various types of activation, and how these are defined, are model-dependent.

Information flow affects grammatical structures such as

• word order
  Word order
  In linguistics, word order typology refers to the study of the order of the syntactic constituents of a language, and how different languages can employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic subdomains are also of interest...
  
   (topic, focus, and afterthought constructions).
• active, passive, or middle voice.
• choice of deixis
  Deixis
  In linguistics, deixis refers to the phenomenon wherein understanding the meaning of certain words and phrases in an utterance requires contextual information. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their denotational meaning varies depending on time and/or place...
  
  , such as articles
  Article (grammar)
  An article is a word that combines with a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. Articles specify the grammatical definiteness of the noun, in some languages extending to volume or numerical scope. The articles in the English language are the and a/an, and some...
  
  ; "medial" deictics such as Spanish
  Spanish language
  Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
  
   ese and Japanese
  Japanese language
  is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
  
   sore are generally determined by the familiarity of a referent rather than by physical distance.
• overtness of information, such as whether an argument
  Verb argument
  In linguistics, a verb argument is a phrase that appears in a syntactic relationship with the verb in a clause. In English, for example, the two most important arguments are the subject and the direct object....
  
   of a verb
  Verb
  A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...
  
   is indicated by a lexical noun phrase
  Noun phrase
  In grammar, a noun phrase, nominal phrase, or nominal group is a phrase based on a noun, pronoun, or other noun-like word optionally accompanied by modifiers such as adjectives....
  
  , a pronoun
  Pronoun
  In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun , such as, in English, the words it and he...
  
  , or not mentioned at all.