As M.A.K Halliday noted several decades ago, a label in the London subway told: Dogs must be carried, and made one of the passengers hesitate whether he should return home to look for his dog and take it with him. The wording was later on amended to Carry dogs. However, if we understand well, this is no real amendation, since in any case, it is the intonation pattern that is decisive here: either you are told that (if you have) a dog (then it) must be carried, or you are told that you must carry a dog. In other words, the focus of the sentence is expressed by the intonation centre (typically, the falling sentence stress), and (in a declarative sentence) the focus says something (“new”) about the rest of the sentence, the “given” topic. Similarly as in English, the position of the intonation centre (together with the word order) is relevant in other languages. The present contribution discusses the phenomenon illustrated by this anecdote in three parts (information structure, topic-focus articulation and translation, text coherence).