Functional sentence perspective

Petr Sgall
Table of contents

The speaker can distinguish those sentence parts presented as easily accessible in the hearer’s memory (‘given’) from those denoting items to be attached in a ‘new’ relationship. In a declarative sentence the latter are asserted to hold about the former. This dichotomy, handled under headings such as Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP, topic-focus or theme-rheme articulation, information structure) since 150 years ago, was later discussed by German linguists (e.g. G. von der Gabelentz, H. Paul, P. Wegener, H. Ammann) and then introduced into structural linguistics by V. Mathesius; now this issue is crucial in discussions on the interplay of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. A detailed account can be found in Sgall et al. (1986).

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