The Collaborative Research Centre (Sonderforschungsbereich, SFB) "Information structure: the linguistic means for structuring utterances, sentences and texts", funded by the German Research Foundation, brings together scientists from the areas of linguistics, psychology and German Studies of the University of Potsdam and linguistics and African Studies of the Humboldt-University Berlin. Altogether 15 projects grouping 42 researchers are involved in this joint enterprise. Their common scientific goals are the formulation of integrative models of information structure, the in-depth study of information structure in the various disciplines of linguistics, the better understanding of the embedding of the principles of information structure in human cognition in the areas of language processing and acquisition, as well as practical applications for their findings.

We define information structure as the structuring of linguistic information, typically in order to optimize information transfer within discourse. The underlying idea is that the same information needs to be prepared or "packaged" in different ways depending on the background and the goal of the discourse. Three aspects are of particular theoretical interest: first, the interaction of the relevant formal levels (phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, the choice of lexical means, the composition of texts); second, the general cognitive processing of information structure; and third, a crosslinguistic typology of information structural devices.