The issue of information structure in language has been studied extensively both in the Prague School of Linguistics and in the Functional Generative Description [FGD, 11, 5]. This theory of representation of linguistic meaning is the framework for a family of multi-level annotation projects, in particular the Prague Dependency Treebank for Czech [PDT, 2, 3] and the Prague Arabic Dependency Treebank [PADT, 4, 12]. Information structure — the question of ‘the given’ and ‘the new’ in an utterance and how it is expressed — is considered to contribute to the linguistic meaning, and its annotation in PDT is part of the third, the most detailed and abstract level of linguistic description. Next to determining which elements in a sentence are context-bound and which are non-bound (the elementary distinctive feature from which the topic–focus dichotomy is derived), attention is also paid to the resolution of anaphoric relations and to capturing the communicative dynamism of a proposition (annotations of coreference and deep word order, respectively) [9]. In PADT, which now consists of the morphological and the analytical levels of description of Arabic, a similar annotation of information structure is being established. In our contribution, we would like to overview the theoretical concepts we work with, and present our formal treatment of a number of prototypical, yet corpus-based, instances of linguistic phenomena that have a principal impact on the structure of information in Arabic [6, 1]. The applicability of the general approach to written as well as spoken Arabic will be the main point of our account. In FGD, the description of information structure incorporates also the notions of intonation center and stress, contrast, subjective word order, or potential ellipsis, which are directly connected to prosody. We will provide references to other related computational research, too [cf. e.g. 8, 7, 10].