Functional Sentence Perspective in Written and Spoken Communication [Paperback]

Jan Firbas discusses the key phenomenon of communicative dynamism.Jan Firbas discusses the key phenomenon of communicative dynamism, which the sentence elements carry in different degrees, and the distribution of which determines the orientation or perspective of the sentence.Jan Firbas discusses the key phenomenon of communicative dynamism, which the sentence elements carry in different degrees, and the distribution of which determines the orientation or perspective of the sentence.The Prague School theory of functional sentence perspective (FSP) is concerned with the distribution of information as determined by all meaningful elements in a written or spoken sentence, such as intonation, word order and context. Jan Firbas discusses the key phenomenon of communicative dynamism, which the sentence elements carry in different degrees, and the distribution of which determines the orientation or perspective of the sentence.Preface; List of abbreviations; Part I. Functional Sentence Perspective in Written Communication: 1. Introduction; 2. The sentence and the carriers of communicative dynamism; 3. The contextual factor; 4. The semantic factor; 5. The theme and the non-theme; 6. Some special issues of the theory of functional sentence perspective; 7. Word order and functional sentence perspective; Part II. Functional Sentence Perspective in Spoken Communication; 8. Non-prosodic distribution of degrees of communicative dynamism and degrees of prosodic prominence; 9. Some more observations on the relationship between the non-prosodic distribution of communicative dynamism and that of prosodic prominence; 10. Analyses of two spoken texts; 11. Some special issues concerning functional sentence perspective in the spoken language; References; Index.