Linguistica Pragiensa 34/1-2, 1992,2-26 and 55-86.

THE HERITAGE OF FUNCTIONAL SENTENCE PERSPECTIVE

FROM THE STANDPOINT OF TEXT LINGUISTICS{1}

Robert de Beaugrande

1. Formalism, structuralism, functionalism

 1.1 From the standpoint of text linguistics today, the central theses of the Czechoslovakian “functional” approach, some of them articulated over sixty years ago, sound strikingly modern. Whereas linguistic schools like those in Geneva, Paris, and Copenhagen exalted the “structural principle”, formulated particularly by Saussure, that a “language” is an abstract system of mutually related and determining elements, Czechoslovakian schools like those in Prague, Brno, and Bratislava promulgated the “functional principle” that a “language” is a system of elements to be deployed in communicative functions. And whereas Saussurian structuralism embraced the thesis that “the true and unique object of linguistics is language [langue] studied in and for itself”, a “fundamental thesis of functional structuralism” was that “language [Iangue] is a system of means appropriate to a goal”.{2}

1.2 According to Vilém Mathesius, the chief founder of the Czechoslovakian functional approach, “the traditional method of linguistic research may be called 'formal” in the sense that the form as the thing known has constantly been made the starting point of the investigation, whereas the meaning or function of the form has been regarded as that which should be found”.{3} This tradition doubtless reflects the impression that the forms of language, once they are transcribed, constitute much more tangible manifestations than do meanings and functions. However, to the degree that language is a medium expressly designed for organizing and correlating forms, meanings, and functions, the limitation of a description to the transcribed and abstracted forms is more problematic than has been widely believed. In effect, the investigator utilizes meanings and functions during the process of discovering or arranging the forms, but does not disclose these uses in the final description. In consequence, the uses of meaning and function as an integral part of both language communication and language description have not been subjected to adequate examination and control. This problem becomes acute whenever two or more formal descriptions of the same system or phenomenon cannot be reconciled; we would need an explicit account of how they were attained through diverging appropriations via meaning and function.

1.3 Mathesius (Ioc. cit.) programmatically advocated a “modern linguistics” which “takes the meaning or function as the starting point and tries to find out by what means it is expressed”. Whereas “older linguistics” “proceeded” “from form to function”, such a “modern linguistics” would “proceed from function to form”. In actual practice, though, neither direction of “procedure” could be exclusively maintained. Whereas any formal method must consider function without acknowledging it, any functional procedure must appropriate forms as a substrate for implementing and identifying functions. Thus, the two procedures depicted by Mathesius should be two complementary agendas or priorities.

1.4 But the history of modern linguistics reveals a periodic and unproductive antagonism between formal and functional agendas. The problem remains: how and how far can forms be separated from the functions they carry in actual occurrences without thereby sacrificing the key qualities that constitute language? Most versions of formalism involve quite arbitrary assumptions on this point or evade the problem with ambiguous notations that are explicitly formal but implicitly functional (2.9, 19). Yet until the problem is squarely faced and resolved, we cannot precisely determine how formal constructs and the conclusions based on they correspond to whatever facts we can derive from the data of language functioning in real-life discourse. Many correspondences are possible in principle, and the selection of any one may significantly influence the results.

1.5 The two agendas project sharply diverging modes of analysis. Whereas a formal analysis is progressively constrictive and terminates at a set point when 'all forms are identified and connected, a functional analysis is progressively expansive and shades off in degrees of decreasing relevance (cf. 2.22, 30). The analyst as language user is heavily involved in both kinds of analysis, but formal methods render this involvement less obtrusive. Functional methods are more likely to point to the complex and context-sensitive dispositions and decisions the analyst must undertake in order to attain a given result. This effect may leadlinguists to decry functioned analysis as subjective, idiosyncratic, and so on. Yet in fact the contrary may hold: formal analysis obliges the analyst to rely on arbitrary, untested suppositions and decisions about the roles of particular forms. Formalism does not eliminate the “guesswork” charged against functionalism (3.67), but introduces its own mode of guesswork (1.2, 18; 2.20, 31).

1.6 The central thread in the history of linguistics so far has been a continual, circumspect manoeuvring along the borders of forma Formalism proper tries to keep this manoeuvring on the formal side as far as possible and to cross over into function only for brief and proximate incursions. We see the influence of this ambition in the general assumption that function and meaning are genuinely secured when we can find distinctive formal correlates and consequences. An English grammarian for instance expects a classification of “sentence types” to include those that are formally differentiated in English, such as “question” and “exclamation”, whereas a linguist dealing with other languages, such as K.L. Pike, might postulate types like “disappointment”, which was inspired by its formal differentiation in Menomini.{4}

1.7 Due to this concern for formal anchoring, the most influential experience for structuralist linguistics was its engagement with languages that correlate form with function In ways quite unknown in familiar ones like English. One pioneer, Edward Sapir,{5} opined that “a sympathetic grasp of the expression of the various classes of concepts in alien types of speech” is encouraged “when one has learned to feel what is fortuitous or illogical or unbalanced in the structure of one's own language”. “It is often precisely the familiar that a wider perspective reveals as the curiously exceptional”. The highly diverse correlations between form and function in, say, Amerindian and Polynesian languages reveal the familiar descriptive terms for English to be far from exact or transparent. In Yana of Northern California, Sapir was perplexed to report, “the noun and the verb” “hold in common” some “features” that “draw them nearer to each other than we feel to be possible”; and the language has, “strictly speaking, no other parts of speech”, “the adjective”, “the numeral, the interrogative pronoun”, and “certain conjunctions and adverbs” all being “verbs” (op. cit., 199). If the correspondence between form and function had to be the same in all languages as in English, then Yana would suffer from such a severe functional underdifferentiation that communication would scarcely be feasible. The so-called “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” that each language leads its users to see the world differently might be restated: for various reasons -- only some of which are historically, culturally, or psychologically proximate or discoverable -- each language correlates the organization of forms with the organization of functions in its own particular ways. To compare languages, we need a terminology and description based neither on forms alone nor on functions alone, but in form-function correlations.

1.8 Functionalism too manoeuvres along the borders of form, albeit on the other side from formalism. Michael Halliday puts it this way: though “based on meaning”, “a functional grammar” is “an interpretation of linguistic forms”: “every distinction” -- “every set of options, or 'system'“ -- must “make some contribution to the form of the wording”.{6} He set forth the “principle” “that all categories employed must be clearly 'there' in the grammar of the language”, “not set up simply to label differences in meaning”.

1.9 In traditional grammar -- and much of the criticism linguistics has directed against it reflects this very factor -- the complementarity between form and function was routinely accepted at face value without much self-consciousness or dispute. Commonalities of function were seen as a handy resource for stabilizing a formal category. A category like “dative” or “ablative”, for instance, which occupied a certain position in each declension of Latin, was centred on the functional conception of “giving” or “carrying away”, respectively, just what the etymology of the terms suggests. These functional identities preserved the order of the declension despite the widespread formal convergence of dative and ablative in the plural. In contrast, formalist linguistics went further by suggesting that the functional import or meaning of such formal category was (at least originally) obligatory and exclusive, whence Jakobson's thesis of invariant meaning for each “case” in Indo-European declensions.{7}

1.10 Yet functional support had to be flexible so that historical changes in whole systems of forms would not render the system chaotic. In comparison to Old English, for example, Modern English has leveled most of its inflectional paradigms of declension and conjugation, and some dialects have carried this trend still further than has standard written English. In return, word order has become much less flexible, as particular arrangements have taken over the functional load previously carried by inflectional differentiation. The lack of formal distinctions hardly impedes communication, but obliges every formal linguistic description of English to incorporate functional information in some guise. A linguist's evergreen like sample (1) is easily described as “Article + Noun + Verb + Article + Noun” even though by themselves, man and ball could be verbs, and hit could be a noun; the formal description is supported by a plausible functional organization of “Agent + Action + Object of Action”. The familiar garden-path sentence (2), in contrast, can seem formally ambiguous on first reading because the functional organization is much less plausible, the old man being readily identified as an operative unit, whereas the activity of manning is far more uncommon than hitting and hardly suitable for old people anyway. Sammie (3) is less likely to be prematurely misparsed because tiring is a predictable action of the old, and an old tire makes a less reasonable agent for an action. Sample (4) would require a very peculiar context to indicate how the hit might be a group of agents and how they might go about manning a ball.

(1) The man hit the ball.

(2) The old man the boats.

(3) The old tire more easily than the young

(4) The hit man the ball

Formal linguistics is usually content to diagnose alternatives or ambiguities and to account for each reading as a correlate of differing but unambiguous forms, e.g., as an ambiguous “surface structure” for more than one unambiguous “deep structure” (cf. 1.23, 2.9f, 37; 3.22). This method again utilizes functional criteria to construct plausible formal correlations but describes them as formal criteria (cf. 1.2, 13).

1.11 All In all, modern linguistics has persistently underestimated the role of function and meaning in the appropriation of forms. Linguists have criticized traditional “parts of speech” schemes for relying informally on function and meaning, but their own formal schemes merely made the reliance implicit. The traditional definition of a “noun” as “the name of a person, place, or thing” certainly seems less objective and reliable than the formal definition of a “noun” as an item which can be preceded by the and followed by a plural ending. Yet “article” and “plural” too have not just formal aspects, but functional and semantic ones which mediate against applying them to certain nouns. Unless a special context is constructed, (5a) seems acceptable and (5b) and (5c) do not, even though mankind is undeniably a noun in all the samples:

(5a) Mankind is rapidly destroying the Earth.

(5b) The mankind is rapidly destroying the Earth.

(5e) *Mankinds/menkind are rapidly destroying the Earth.

The terms “definite” and “indefinite article” are even more conspicuously functional, indeed multifunctional (3.30) -- so that formal grammars usually prefer just to list them as a conveniently small and recognizable word-class labelled “ART”) rather than to offer a formal definition. Historically, one might formally classify the definite article among the deictics, and the indefinite article among the numerals. But in a contemporary (“synchronic”) description, we would have to admit that both form and function have changed since then; and the small repertory of forms corresponds today to a wide repertory of functions.

1.12 The agenda of modern linguistics has been dominated by the project of steadily increasing the formality of both theory and description and expecting that ail relevant functional factors would eventually be reconstructed as formal ones. The “distributional” linguistics advocated by Z.S. Harris proposed to consider only the arrangement of formal items in language samples.{8} A description enumerating which forms are regularly preceded or followed by certain other forms of course reflects meanings and functions as well. However, the formal description tends to underrate the fact that distribution (word order) itself is a meaningful and functional aspect of language (cf. 1.10; 2.18-22). If we say that man is a noun In Sample (1) by virtue of its systematic distribution, we are in effect saying that the form-function assignment is systematic enough to give rise to such a distribution in the first place.

1.13 Due to the dominant agenda, the immediate descendant of distributionalism was not functionalism but a still more elaborate formalism. Harris had realized that he could enhance the distributional regularity of a discourse sample by transforming its constituent sentences into parallel forms. If a sample discourse contained sequences like you will be satisfied and satisfied customers, the second could be transformed into customers are satisfied.{9} His star pupil Chomsky transposed this essentially heuristic tactic into a central principle for relating linguistic theory to linguistic data. A set of rules able to convert any type of allowed formal sequence into any other type would be a complete account or “grammar” of a language (2.2). Intriguingly, major support for this proposal was drawn from data in which forms and their distributions are unenlightening and underdifferentiated. Thus, the equivalent distributions of

(6) John is eager to please

(7) John is easy to please.

were held to conceal the grammatical (actually functional) aspect that John is doing the “pleasing” in (6) but not in (7). Since Chomsky also inherited Harris' aspiration for a “purely formal”{10} approach, he too failed to acknowledge that his recognition of the differences between such sentences was derived from intuitions about meaning and function. His “transformational grammar” and much of the linguistics it inspired was officially conceived as an enterprise for correlating not form with function or meaning, but form with form. The axiomatic basis of the theory was the “sentence”, not as a unit marked off in discourse on semantic and functional grounds but as a formal unit related by form-manipulating rules to every other such unit in the language. A full set of such rules which would “generate” all allowable e types and no others was projected to be the ideal tool for a” complete grammatical description (cf. 2.9). However, the constraints on what a real speaker might regard as a possible sentence proved formally intractable because they are prominently semantic and functional, and the ambition for a. purely formal account had to be modified. The revisions of Chomsky's “standard theory”, such as “case grammar” and “generative semantics”, were essentially agendas for importing semantic and functional criteria into a system of form-form correlations with the least possible sacrifice of formality (cf. 3.22, 25).

1.14 Many disputes have accordingly centred neither on the nature of language nor the status of data, but on the proper criteria and degree of formality a theory or description ought to have in order to count as “serious”, “rigorous”, “scientific”, and so on. The formalist stance has consistently been that only formal linguistics may establish these criteria, and that a theory may be superseded only by a more formal one; to move over to a less formal one would constitute a sacrifice of principle and a betrayal of science. The stance gives rise to endless controversy as long as we still lack a complete formal account of any language from which confirmed criteria could in fact be determined. Instead, we have only partial and fragmentary formal accounts resting upon considerable -- and as yet undetermined -- amounts of unacknowledged semantic and functional information.

1.15 Our problems are intensified by the prevailing interpretation of formality as a determinate phenomenon (cf. 3.28f). Because the forms of a language constitute the aspect of the language about which grammarians and linguists are most likely to agree, a formal description is expected to be deterministic it should, through formalization, eliminate all approximations, undecidables, and ambiguities, and should admit no equally valid alternative. However, language can be operational for communication only if determinacy is a fluctuating and distributive factor.{11} It belongs to the meaning of meaning and to the function of function that both meaning and function must be open and multiplex at the system level so that their correlation with forms can be determined in a wide range of ways at the discourse level.

1.16 The Czechoslovakian tradition going back to Mathesius presents an instructive contrast to the formalist agenda. If, as he counselled, we “take the meaning or function as the starting point and try to find out by what means it is expressed”, we have no a priori or definitive criteria for determining which mode and degree of formality and determinacy will be appropriate to the description. Since “function” is itself a correlation of factors, its nature is fundamentally both complex and non-deterministic. We may well appreciate why Mathesius observed that “the deeper insight we get into the organization of language, the more we are persuaded of its complexity and of the impossibility of arriving at” “clear cut statements”; or why Danes remarked that “the empirical study of languages shows clearly that any neatly patterned scheme of the structure of language does not sufficiently account for their complexities and semi-regularities”.{12}

1.17 It might help here to clarify a dualism within the term “complexity”.{13} In a positive sense, a phenomenon (notably a scientific theory or a work of art) is called “complex” when it succeeds in integrating multifarious and diverse aspects. In a negative sense, a phenomenon is called “complex” to suggest that its aspects resist integration. The chief business of science is to convert negative complexity into positive complexity. In its search for formal and deterministic description, linguistics has conventionally seen formal complexity as positive and functional complexity as negative. A chief tactic of description has thus been formal complication plus functional simplification. This tactic leads to imbalances and disturbances when the neglect of functional criteria allows the formal complexity of description to rise unchecked, e.g. in a massive complication and proliferation of formal “rules” and “features” (cf. 2.14).

1.18 The term “structure” also needs to be reassessed. If a “structure” is defined as “a relation between mutually relevant elements”, and a “function” is defined as “a role assigned to an element within a systemic configuration”, the two terms seem quite compatible. A given element might be said to have a certain “function” within a “structure” or a class of “structures”, while a “structure” could be designated as the product of functional assignment. However, the two terms have often been deployed in ways reflecting the theoretical and methodological disparities between formal structuralism (including generativism) and functionalism (sometimes called “functional structuralism”).{14} Typically, the “structure” was grasped as a bond between forms, and the “function” as an alignment between form and non-form. The “structure” was therefore more likely to be discovered and treated as a self-sufficient inter-formal relation within the language system, thereby downplaying the involvement of the linguist in the production of structures, or (in the aphorism of Andre Martinet, another prominent functionalist),{15} the process whereby “the structuralist is not one who discovers structures, but one who makes them”. “Structuralism” accordingly claimed to be more formal and rigorous than functionalism in theory, but in practice tended to be more incomplete and reductive.

1.19 The formal orientation naturally encouraged a restriction of the term “structure” to relations within a single subsystem or level, while “constituency” was said to obtain between elements that figure inside one unit on the next higher level (e.g. between “words” in a “phrase”) (2.29). The most exemplary “structure” was the “binary opposition” between two elements on one level. Here, the function of the elements was reduced to the absolute minimum: two elements of equal status (e.g. two “phonemes”) differing in a single crucial property (e.g. “voiced” versus “unvoiced”). The attraction of this concept encouraged radical theses, such as the absolute primacy of binarism and the strict separation of levels.{16) Yet to state that a form has the “function” of being an element in a formal structure, is hardly more than to reassert that it is a form.

1.20 For the reasons given above, we might prefer not just to attempt a functional reinterpretation of already-complicated formal linguistic theories and data, but also to inquire how functional and formal complexity can be manageably correlated in principle. If we work all the way through one side and then try to add on the other, the correlations tend to seem unwieldy and makeshift (e.g. as an occasion for another whole set of formal “rules” such as “transformations”, cf. 2.14). Only if we consider the correlations” at every step of discovery and description can we recognize their systemic interdependence.

1.21 In another contrast depicted by Mathesius,{17} “transferred into real life, the formal method coincides with the method of a hearer, who has to find the meaning of words or sentences he hears”; “the functional method” should consider “the point of view of the speaker or the writer, who has to find linguistic forms for what he wishes to express”. Again, neither method can be exclusive, since speaker and hearer are just as complementary as function and form, though not exactly in the same manner: the speaker makes a range of decisions, some more conscious and some less so, about how to correlate form, meaning, and function, and expects the hearer to make reasonably corresponding correlations. But in linguistic analysis, formal methods abstract away from the decision-making process and start with sample sentences already transcribed. If these have been invented for the purpose of analysis and description, the analyst takes on the speaker's role as well but from a non-representative standpoint of reduced functionality.

1.22 In sum, the heritage of Saussurian linguistics has been a set of interconnected structuralist and formalist theses about the nature of language and its description. The “langue” (language in abstraction) has been generally seen as a formal scheme of subsystems of levels, each internally constituted by formal arrays of differences. By implication, functional and intersystemic relations would belong to the sphere of “parole” (language in use). Functional linguistics would then face the options either of turning to “parole”, as Skalicka did, or of rejecting the “langue-parole” dichotomy entirely, as Trnka and Halliday did.{18} The most significant step would be to replace the dichotomy with a continual productive dialectic between “langue” and “parole”, between virtual and actual (cf. 2.10,13, 21,23, 29; 3.2, 15, 44; 4.16). It would be obtuse to imagine that every correlation between form and function entails an exactly corresponding movement between langue and parole; the correlation is feasible only because the two are alternative perspectives of the same phenomena engendered within an indissolvable dialectic.

1.23 Here we should consider carefully what sense we should attribute to the term “dialectic”. The classic sense of defining something in terms of what it is not might be confused with the static Saussurian conception of “difference” (culminating in the binary opposition) as the constitutive principle of order within the abstract system of differences (1.19). A more dynamic and productive sense would be that the function of an entity (not necessarily the entity itself) is defined by the contribution it makes to and receives from the entities which it is not but which are relevant to its occurrence. To see form-function correlations as dialectical in this sense is to assert on the one hand that form and function are different aspects and to insist on the other hand that the tension of their differentness is productive of significance. Applied to pairs like “langue” and “parole”, or “competence” and “performance”, or “deep structure” and “surface structure”, this sense affirms the alterity of two perspectives on a given data set yet sees each perspective as mutually constitutive of the other, including a systematic potential for intervention and change. Though we may not be able to perceive the same phenomenon simultaneously from both perspectives, we can continually shift from one to another and reappropriate the phenomenon.

1.24 The more formal versions of structuralism since Saussure, including generativism since Chomsky, have not proceeded as Mathesius imagined: they have taken form not merely as “the starting point”, but as the stopping point too. Theories and models have been obliged to overload and complicate formal aspects with implicit or disguised functional and semantic aspects. The multifunctionality and semantic openness of many forms and form-classes are in turn viewed as factors for theories and models not just to record and describe, but to resolve and eliminate. This demand can lead to such powerful reductions, idealizations, and exclusions that the completeness and relevance of the resulting description are difficult to establish. This dilemma may well be responsible for many of the disputes and crises we have seen in modern linguistics up to this very day.

1.25 To resolve the dilemma, the terms “structure”, “structuralism”, “function”, and “functionalism” should be reassessed within a more strategic and integrative framework. For a domain as complex as language, such terms should net be restricted in principle to specific aspects which seem easiest to appropriate, nor should the degree of formality and determinacy be determined a priori. The major emphasis should be placed on the activities of building structures and assigning functions, rather than on the labelled notations or classifications of structures and functions via formal criteria after the fact. These precepts are of course easier to formulate than to implement. But as long as they are discounted or postponed, linguistics will continue to be endangered by internal controversies and unrealistic demands. 

2. “Functional perspective” and the “sentence”

 2.1 Most functionalists today would agree with Halliday (cit. note 15, 46) that “a functional theory is a theory of language and is an essential aspect of any theory that attempts to explain the nature of language”. They would also agree with Danes and Vachek that the “mutual relations of subsystems, far from splitting the unity of the language system, rather strengthen and underline it”.{19}

2.2 The question is then how we implement these principles when we gather and organize our data. A task sequence we actually find in linguistic theory and research has included three steps: first to describe the structures of a set of sentences or utterances, second to describe their structural relatedness, and third to describe their strategic communicative potential. The first step has been taken by structuralist grammars, which discover the organization of a sentence or utterance by segmenting and labelling constituents. The second step has been taken by generative grammars, which postulate rules to make explicit the structural relations among the entire set of alternative sentences of a language (e.g. as “transformations”). The third step can best be taken by functional approaches, which consider how each alternative might be strategic for certain communicative intentions and decisions. However, considerations raised in section 1 indicate that these steps should be taken in parallel rather than (as they often were) in a detached or even competitive sequence.

2.3 The importance of this third step became clear to me when I encountered research on “functional sentence perspective” (hereafter “FSP”). The facts brought forth regarding FSP seemed to me unquestionably “linguistic” in any reasonable sense of the term. Indeed, the linguistic organization of sentences or utterances in a language with flexible word-order like Czech would seem quite unsystemic or unsystematic if FSP were disregarded. Even in a language with a restricted word-order like English, FSP helps to account for intuitively plausible differences between alternative organizations of the same linguistic material in a sentence or utterance. For Halliday, therefore, FSP is “part of general linguistic theory” and “a universal phenomenon” -- “a semiotic system without FSP would not be a language”.{20} This “universality” rests not on units, positions, and boundaries, but on “the cooperation of means of FSP, varying from language to language in accordance with the differences in grammatical structure”.{21}

2.4 I realized that FSP research constitutes a qualitatively distinctive dimension in linguistics. Its heritage is not so much a centralized “standard theory”, but a wide-ranging array of deliberations on perspectives and conditions. The leit-motif of this array is the intent to examine form, function, and meaning not each by itself, but in their mutual interactions both in actual communication and in contemplations or investigations of language. The description of such interactions is necessarily complex, but hopefully in the positive sense of providing a more encompassing and dynamic understanding of the organization of language (1.17).

2.5 On a very general plane, the “functions” identified in the Viennese tradition by Buhler and Kainz and extended by Mukarovsky and Jakobson (cf. 3.40) are relevant to Czechoslovakian research and were indeed conceived “in direct collaboration” with it, as I learn from Horalek.{22} “Buhler began from the conception of language as an instrument and thus continued the tradition going back to Kratylos and Plato” (op. cit., 41). For the speaker, the “expressive” function dominates (in Buhler's work, first “Kundgabe”, later “Ausdruck”). For the listener, the “appelative” function dominates (in Buhler's work, first “Auslosung”, then “Appell”). For the message itself, the “representative” function dominates (in Buhler's work, “Darstellung”).

2.6 This scheme of functions, however, is too general to offer more than a starting point for the analysis of utterances. Every utterance entails all three functions, and the modes of evidence for this entailment can be quite complex and diverse. Discourse often constructs or negotiates the world rather than merely “representing” it (3.13f). The speaker's “appeal” is to enlist the hearer in this construction and negotiation, not just to represent something, but to confirm or revise a presumed expectation, or to appear knowledgeable, reliable, or deserving of solidarity, and so on. All these motives can -have characteristic functional consequences.

2.7 The original Czech term introduced by Mathesius,{23} “actualni cleneni vetne”, might be translated “current sentence patterning”, but this version seems unduly narrow and form-oriented. The translation “functional sentence perspective”, following Mathesius' own German rendition “funktionale Satzperspektive”, has important advantages. As argued in section 1, functional, the first item in the term, implies a central concern for language patterns as interactions of form, function, and meaning. The third item, perspective, has the advantage of invoking not the pattern itself, but the viewpoint brought to bear on the pattern. A “perspective” is a wholistic cognitive disposition rather than an object, sequence, or unit; and resists being segmented into “minimal units” or “distinctive features”, or confined inside one level, or reduced to a formalism or formula. Moreover, the constructional and negotiational quality of discourse is kept in the foreground: the perspective constitutes as well as reflects and organizes the message.

2.8 The middle item in Mathesius term, sentence, has proved to be a central point of discussion. The main reason perhaps is that, as Danes observed,{24} “the sentence” has been “the kernel concept” in “systemic research”, yet “its content seems to be very variable, vague, complex, and undifferentiated”. It is not even clear where the sentence belongs in theory or method. For some authorities, like Saussure and Benveniste,{25} the sentence belongs to the domain of “parole”. For others, like Mathesius{26} and Chomsky, the sentence is the prime unit of the language system, while the “utterance” is the unit of “parole”. But, as Firbas warned,{27} this thesis should not lead us too readily to “the conclusion that non-utterance phenomena belong to the sphere of 'langue', whereas utterance phenomena belong to the sphere of parole”.

2.9 Due to its formal orientation portrayed in section 1, American linguistics was particularly concerned to situate the sentence inside the language system: first in structuralism as the sole “independent form not included in any larger” one{28} and thus as the structural framework in which other units should be discovered; then in generativism as the axiomatic framework for relating any possible formal arrangement of the language to the whole set of such arrangements through a rule system representing the speaker's “competence” (cf. 1.13; 2.2). Both the structuralist and generative notions of the sentence, however, remained uneasily positioned between “langue” and “parole”, and hardly in any dialectical sense. The segmentational method of structuralist analysis typically began with the sentence and worked down to the minimal units like phonemes and morphemes, whose abstractness and systemic status seemed decidedly clearer than that of the sentence itself. Being close to the utterance, the sentence might appear to be an actualised sequence of constituents belonging to the virtual system. The possible contradiction here -- the whole having a different status than the parts -- could be offset by the distinction between “type” (virtual system) and “token” (actual occurrence), which, like many other conceptions, was clear enough for phonemes (systemic unit versus produced sound) but much less so for sentences. In the generative method, the “type” status of the sentence was based on its rule-governed convertibility into other sentences of the systemic repertory, and the “token” status covered everything else, including the conditions of its production and reception. The later division between “deep structure” and “surface structure” ran along parallel lines, while the type-token problem in effect became an issue of formal conversion and notation (cf. 1.4, 2.19, 31).

2.10 The uneasy position of the sentence is a natural consequence of its status as both a functional and a formal unit and of the widespread uncertainty about whether and how far functional aspects belong to “langue” or (in generativism) to “competence” (1.21). In structuralism, these aspects were often set apart as “stylistic” or “rhetorical” issues rather than strictly “linguistic” ones. Generativism first allotted such issues to “surface structure” and later, when the potential of FSP for simplifying the description of word order was recognized (especially for languages other than English), to “deep structure”, the solution endorsed in Czechoslovakia by the Sgall group among others.{29} However, the argument in section 1 indicates that functional issues don't properly belong on any level, but arise from the dialectical interaction among levels, e.g. between deep and surface structure (1.22f).

2.11 Mathesius' solution was to “distinguish between the sentence as a pattern belonging to the language system and the sentence as part of the context, i.e. utterance, a component of the discourse” (cit. note 27). Definitions of the “sentence” in Czechoslovakian research have accordingly assumed a less abstract and formalizing character than elsewhere, e.g. “the sentence” is “an elementary verbal act of taking a standpoint toward some reality” (Vachek); or “the sentence” “is a field of relations, chiefly grammatical and semantic, functioning according to a given degree of contextual dependence, in a certain kind of perspective” (Firbas); or again “the sentence” of “a natural language” is “a systemic form of an elementary communicative linguistic act” (Sgall et al.).{30}

2.12 To consolidate their wider views of the sentence, the Czechoslovakian functionalists diverged from the structuralist and generativist intent to confine the sentence within “syntax” or “grammar” as a single “level” or “component” of language description. Instead, they undertook to distribute the sentence over formal, semantic, and functional domains. Following the functionalists' “fundamental thesis” that “language [la langue] is a system of means of expression that are appropriate to a goal” (1.1), Danes formulated “the utterance function” “of language systems: to be available for producing utterances” (cit. note 2, 127). “The stratificational hierarchy of language systems reflects the fact that its items are placed in different distances” from this “global function”: “the items on the lowest stratum” “exert this function” “most indirectly”, whereas “the items of the sentence stratum” do so “immediately”. Danes suggests that “the units of a lower stratum are less complex than those oft the higher”, while “the units of a higher stratum are constructed of units of the lower one, though not only of them” (op. cit., 128). “Consequently, the relation between a stratum and the next higher stratum” “may be interpreted as a means-end relation: the lower being the “means” and “the higher” being “the domain of functional implementation”. “This inter-stratal functional nexus” is an “internal” “constructional function” in which “both form and meaning participate”, “in contradistinction to the external utterance function”. Each “stratum” is composed of “the class of units showing the same degree of complexity and having” “the same constructional function” (op. cit., 129) — plainly positive complexity in the sense of 1.17.

2.13 The best-known proposal for correlating “external” with “internal” was Danes' “three-level approach”: the “grammatical structure of sentence”, “the semantic structure of sentence”, and “the organization of utterance” (cit. note 24, 226ff). The third level, that of utterance, represents “the functional perspective in a strict sense” and, in Firbas' words, “makes it possible to understand how the semantic and the grammatical structure function in the very act of communication”.{31} But the crucial functionality, I suggested (2.10), lies not on any one level, but in the “dialectical” interaction of all three in the dynamic sense proposed in 1.22f.

2.14 Doubtless as a concession to structuralist and generative linguistics, Danes suggested that “a strict differentiation” between the “semantic and grammatical levels” is “indispensable” for the “next step” of “ascertaining their systemic interaction” (op. cit., 226). But his citation of Firbas indicates, on the contrary, that a strict separation of levels would make it impossible to understand how either level functions even on its own terms. The only feasible order of the steps could be: first the inter-level perception and comprehension of the utterance and then the attempt at a “strict differentiation”. Even so, the considerations raised in section 1 indicate that the “strictness” of the differentiation might be more apparent than real, the product of an artificial and non-dialectical suppression of relevant interactions. And we might be entrained in a laborious and redundant reconstruction of parallel criteria and patterns for each level under different terms and thus incur a steep rise in “negative” complexity in the sense of 1.17.

2.15 Danes proposed to “distinguish” “the sentence” (1) as “a singular and individual” “utterance-event”, (2) as a “minimal communicative unit (utterance) of a given language”, and.(3) “as an abstract structure or configuration, i.e. a pattern of distinctive features” within the “grammatical system of a given language” (op. cit., 229). The first step would begin with the “utterance-event” pertaining to “speech (la parole)” and being “immediately accessible to our observation”. In the second step, “if we deprive such an event, by way of abstraction, of all accidental, singular, and individual elements”, we attain “an utterance which no longer belongs to speech” and has “non-grammatical but systemic means of organization such as word order” and “intonation”, including “many more features than only those belonging to the most abstract and general syntactic pattern of the grammatical system”. Here, the “sentence” figures as “one of all possible different minimal communicative units (utterances) of the given language”. This “utterance remains a part of context and situation”, “contains concrete lexical items and elements of modality” and “emphasis”. The third and “highest step of generalization” yields the “specific grammatical” “sentence pattern”, which “represents an abstract and static invariant structure (scheme), not a sequence of particular words” within an “utterance based on this underlying pattern” (op. cit., 230f).

2.16 Compared to the three levels, the three steps yield only a partial fit: it is fairly clear how the first and third correspond, but not the second step, whose job it is to discover how “the organization of utterance disposes of” “systemic means which have been, wrongly, classed with grammar, syntax or stylistics” (op. cit., 228). These means merit their own “theory of utterance” or “suprasyntactics” as “a special branch of linguistics” (op. cit., 230) (cf. 3.5). Presumably, the “semantic structure” belongs among the “non-grammatical but systemic means of organization”, but how it could be specifically isolated is not stipulated. Another key question here is what happens to the semantic structure during the third step: it would seem to be filtered out, but as suggested in section 1, it would still influence the discovery of “abstract structure”.

2.17 The “constitutive grammatical features” on the third level would include “parts of speech in morpho-syntactic classification, some morphological categories, and two relations of syntactic connexity, viz. dependence” and “adjunction” (op. cit., 231). The criteria are revealing: “adjunction” is “symmetric” (between elements of equal status), “transitive” carrying over to the other relations of each element), and “reflexive” (mutual), whereas “dependence” is “asymmetric”, “nontransitive”, and “irreflexive”. Of particular interest here are Danes’ stipulations that “adjunction” is an “a syntagmatic relation” and that “the word order belongs to the sentence pattern only” when it has “a grammatical function -- in Slavic languages very rarely” (loc. cit.). For many English grammarians, notably generative ones, word order is of course the primary carrier of grammatical function. In Czech, however, as Mathesius and his successors have commented, the word order follows FSP rather faithfully (cf. 2.28, 32; 3.43, 48). Danes soon recognized from his functional standpoint that the entirety of word order must have a broader and more diverse character, so that the more strictly “grammatical” “relations of syntactic connexity” should fall into a category by themselves. Qualifying one of his two syntactic relations as “asyntagmatic” because it does not entail a “dependence” between items, points to this recognition.

2.18 We see here an intriguing countermovement to the widespread tendency, described in section 1, to load and complicate the formal aspects or components and to construe word order per se as a dependency between elements seen from their next higher-ranking constituent (1.19, 24). Danes now proposed a distinction between the syntagmatic aspect proper (conjoining or adjoining of elements), which in Slavic languages is prominently handled with morphological resources, and the other aspects of word order, both concrete and abstract; and the term “syntax“ was expanded to cover all these aspects with equal regard. In comparison to Danes' concept ion, the “syntax“ of the generative school was both too broad in absorbing all of word order directly into the syntagmatic, and too narrow in excluding semantic and functional motivations for arranging words in one way rather than another. Danes was moving to integrate within a multi-level “syntax” the whole range of issues which western linguistics, especially in the U.S., has often marginalized or scattered among or between narrow levels of description, a rare exception being Peter Hartmann's treatise on Syntax und Bedeutung (Assen, 1964).

2.19 Danes' scheme accordingly transfers away from the “third specifically grammatical level” everything that can be accounted for in functional and semantic terms. He easily saw that this level could subsume not the sentence, but only the “abstract and static structure or scheme” of the “underlying pattern”. This substrate resembled the generativists' “deep structure” (introduced, I should point out, after Danes had formulated his “three level approach”), but the non-functional orientation of the generativists forced them to undermine the autonomy and centrality they attributed to the syntactic component by introducing semantic and functional material in disguise and by handling the notation in ways that clouded the relations between sentence pattern, sentence, and utterance. In Chomsky's Aspects, for example, “no careful distinction” was maintained “between the basic string and sentence itself”, and the discussion proceeded on the “simplifying and contrary to fact assumption that the underlying basic string is the sentence”, and the “base phrase marker is the surface structure as well as the deep structure” (cit. note 29, 18). Moreover, Chomsky said his “grammar does not, in itself, provide any sensible procedure for finding a deep structure of a given sentence” (op. cit., 141).

2.20 For Danes, the “sentence pattern” is “a syntactic structure” that “converts a sequence of words into a minimal communicative unit even outside the framework of connected discourse” (cit. note 24, page 230). From here, he derived the “condition” for “discovering sentence patterns” that the “corpus” be “the set of utterances” “employing the communicative function even outside context and situation”. Danes thereby arrived by an original route at a crucial problem in linguistic method at large. Whereas the apparent functional cohesiveness (or “connexity”) of sentence units has always been the practical basis for discovering them, he now proposed to make it the theoretical basis as well. Admittedly, I don't see how “a pattern” could have a “communicative function outside context and situation”. Linguists who imagine they are treating sentences out of context are typically replacing the real, integrative, and determined context with a fictional, isolative and non-determined context (cf. 1.5, 10). The sentence is extremely easy to use when constructing the latter type of context because sentence patterns are such a convenient and common organizational resource, not because they are a primary, self-sufficient substrate.

2.21 We might therefore reformulate Danes' “discovery condition”: the sentence is a multifunctional structure wherein the sentence pattern makes the syntactic contribution of co-organizing, through dependency and adjunction. a sequence of words into integrative constituents, the top-level constituent extending across the entire pattern. The sentence pattern thus coincides (is co-terminous) with the sentence but is not identical with it because the sentence is also dialectically constituted by semantic and functional contributions. Without these, the sentence would disappear and leave us with only an empty shell or outline lacking the crucial integrative potential mistakenly attributed to syntax alone. I believe this reformulation is fully in the spirit of both theory and practice of Czechoslovakian functionalism, as attested by such definitions of sentence as those cited above from Vachek, Firbas, and the Sgall group (2.11), but has been impeded by the influence of isolative and segmentational notions of “level” and “syntax” suggesting that the syntactic contribution remains intact when the others have been discounted. What would in fact remain is a non-linguistic formula which can be “converted” into a sentence only with all three contributions, whether by a linguist or anyone else; the syntactic one cannot manage this “conversion” by itself.

2.22 Recalcitrant problems with purely syntactic notions of the sentence are predictably most acute for elements not integrated within the more conspicuous structures and dependencies. In English, familiar instances are the “free adverbials” like unfortunately or in my opinion, “connectives” like consequently or on the other hand, and “interjections” like well and oh. Such an element does not depend on or “modify” another element in the rest of the sentence in a way comparable, say, to the relation between an article and its noun. The reformulation in 2.21 indicates why: the elements belong to the sentence not on syntactic grounds, but on functional grounds. A formalist approach is thus impelled either to exclude these elements or to situate them in “underlying” formal dependencies (e.g. inside an “embedding” within “deep structure”). A functionalist approach defines the notion of “constituency” primarily according to functional units and relations, and treats the formal ones as a contributing rather than constitutive factor. The notorious dilemma of the “sentence boundary”, inherent wherever spontaneous discourse is transcribed for purposes of syntactic analysis, thereby loses its virulence, because functional analysis does not insist on constrictive, deterministic description (1.5, 2.30). A “sentence” is a stretch of discourse which participants functionally treat as a sentence, whether or not the “well-formedness criteria” of a purely formal grammar can be directly applied. The latitude of this definition corresponds to the opportunities for different functional treatments in actual discourse.

2.23 The resistance among Czechoslovakian linguists against the notion of “competence” propagated by Chomsky's Aspects is specifically motivated by the insight that competence cannot be dominated by grammar, but must consist of the ability to organize multifunctional units and sequences, particularly sentences. The distinction between “grammatical and ungrammatical” thereby declines in favour of that between “functional” and “non-functional”. The competent speaker-hearer first and foremost performs a functional assessment of any given utterance, using the grammatical or syntactic contribution to support this assessment as a provisional but consensual indicator of relatedness. The phenomena of FSP accordingly document some of the strategies of this primary functional assessment and are central to “competence”, not peripheral or outside it, and the gap vis-a-vis “performance” is replaced with a continual dialectic (cf. 1.22f).

2.24 The semantic contribution of the “sentence” was emphasized in the spirit of “the Prague group”, who have “always striven to be free from the anti-semantic, purely formalistic bias” found among “some other linguistic groups of modern times” (Danes and Vachek, cit. note 19, 21). All the same, formulations were often rather cautious. “In regard to the relation between form and semantic content”, Firbas wrote (cit. note 21,40), it is obvious that not every semantic item is given its own form”. “Semantic relationships” in “natural languages” as opposed to those in “formal logic”, Sgall wrote,{32} are “not monovalent on both sides”, but admit of “asymmetric dualism”, as in “homonymy and synonymy”.

2.25 A more radical formulation of E. Benes raised “the possibility of distinguishing a specific dependence of word order on semantics”, “different from its dependence on grammar” and “based on the assumption: word order is determined by the combinations of abstract semantic categories” -- perhaps what Firbas meant with “the line of semantic structure”.{33} “In the act of communication itself, the assignment of names to the separate elements of reality and their arrangement into a particular sequence with a particular meaning” “may even precede their syntactical arrangement”. “The semantically desirable sequence of sentence components would be constituted first, a suitable grammatical-syntactic arrangement being chosen only afterwards” (Benes, loc. cit.).

2.26 Benes recalls Dokulil and Danes' notion of “a static content pattern” involving “relationships” (often called “logical”, cf. 3.22; 2.37f) like “agent and the action itself, bearer of the state and the state”, and envisions a “pattern of the semantic sentence structure” with “two aspects, i.e. as a means for the actual arrangement of the content elements and as a device for including the utterance in a context”.{34} But he offers a “simpler hypothesis”: “a particular arrangement of semantic categories in the static pattern of a sentence” “would result from the very nature of the discourse as a phenomenon bound to the passing of time, from the necessity to convert a simultaneously and multidimensionally existing extra-lingual reality by means of semantic categories into a linear sequence” (loc. cit.). Some “languages”, among them “Czech and other Slavonic languages”, might have “a semantic word order as an established pattern for the sequence of certain combinations of semantic categories”; “in the dynamic composition of the utterance the required pattern is either chosen ready-made or is modified according to the needs of the context” (cf. 3.8). Conversely, if we “eliminate the context”, we would have Ieft over those “word order configurations” “which result from the relationships of the semantic components” and of “content ideas reflecting extra-lingual reality” (op. cit., 271) (cf. 2.11; 3.13f, 16). Firbas similarly suggests a “semantic structure operating within that section of the sentence that has remained unaffected by, independent of, the preceding context”.{35} Benes goes further still by reserving the term “semantic” for “word order” that is “not affected by the context” (op. cit., 268). Yet this move encroaches on Danes' discovery condition for “sentence pattern”, which I reformulated a moment ago (2.20f).

2.27 One semantic scheme was the Sgall group's “systematic ordering of participants” centered on the “verb”: “actor, time, place, manner, instrument, dative, object of the type ‘what about’, objective (patiens), direction, objective complement, condition, purpose, cause” (cit. note 29, 67f). Many of these are familiar from traditional grammars with case systems. But a novel hypothesis is added, namely that these “participants”, in exactly the sequence quoted, form “a scale of communicative importance”. This scale may be implemented via FSP but may also be rearranged (cf. 3.9ff). Compare Firbas: “on account of their specific semantic character”, certain “words” may “weaken or strengthen the positions in the sentences in a more or less invariable way”.{36}

2.28 A multi-level approach to the arrangement of the sentences is naturally attractive for Czech scholars because it applies so aptly to their native language. Indeed, the conditions of Czech word order may well have been a critical factor motivating the whole enterprise of FSP and inspiring a new outlook on English as well. The old adage that English is best described by speakers of other languages seems quite fitting here.

2.29 Still, even Danes did not seem to have realized (witness his call for a “strict differentiation of semantic and grammatical”, 2.14) the full force and extent of the new approach. He was moving toward a genuinely dialectical conception (in the sense of 1.23) of “level” that departed fundamentally from the established descriptive conceptions wherein cross-relations between levels were invoked only for constituency, e.g. between the levels of “morpheme”, “word”, and “phrase” (1.19; 2.18). This tactic consolidated the form-based levels in a hierarchy of size, but marginalized their semantic and functional interactions. The Czechoslovakian approach, in contrast, disavowed the primacy of form and asserted that the inter-systemic or inter-level relations were the decisive ones because only they could indicate the functions of elements. Danes pointedly demonstrated this assertion with his multi-level functional “syntax” intended to unite form with function and meaning at every step; he reduced the “syntagmatic” to the domain of strict “dependences” and redistributed “word order” across three domains, each of them mutually presupposing and presupposed by the other two.

2.30 What this approach meant in principle might well not be immediately clear, particularly to Western linguists who would see only a confusion of their own tidy pigeonholes and categories. In practice, as the FSP literature continually reveals, it meant that any description of the form of a sentence could only be part of a. more complex scrutiny of communicative functions. Just how far such a scrutiny should proceed would be naturally hard to determine. Linguists accustomed to constrictive formal analysis may be unsettled by expansive functional analysis (1.5, 2.22). Indeed, there can be no strict a priori criteria for the extent or direction of relevant factors in a functional account (1.16, 25).

2.31 The danger was therefore imminent of misconstruing the functional scheme as a variant of prevailing formal-structural ones. Danes' first step of starting with the “utterance-event” “immediately accessible to our observation” (2.15) was often marginalized by the custom of adducing isolated, invented sentences, which are at best utterance events with a reduced functionality (cf. 1.5; 1.21). This custom jumps right into his second step, namely “depriving such a event, by way of abstraction, of all accidental, singular, and individual elements”, yet does not retain “systemic means of organization” whereby the “utterance remains a part of context and situation”. This second step is likely to be the most difficult and disputatious; in fact, competing linguistic methods differ here more than anywhere else. To evade the effects of context and situation, strictly formal methods leave the context-related part of this step entirely implicit and hurry onward to Danes' third step: extracting the “specific grammatical” “sentence pattern” which “represents an abstract and static invariant scheme”. The outcome of such tactics is that the relations between the “observed utterance-event” and the “abstract sentence pattern” remain obscure, as do all parallel relations: between parole and langue, between surface structure and deep structure, between token and type,(37) and so forth.

2.32 It would of course be premature to claim that functional approaches have precisely mapped out the second step such that it can be executed reliably and uniformly in every case. But the practice of functionalism has at least reinstated it firmly within linguistic inquiry. and demonstrated its importance, even -- or especially -- where disputes arise about individual points or claims. In early work, the leading role of FSP as principle of word order in Czech led Mathesius to decry English for being “insusceptible” or “heedless”, “frequently disregarding the requirements of FSP altogether”.{38} A major achievement of his successors has been to revise this negative assessment by revealing the multifunctional nature of FSP. English is not heedless, but, due to other constraints on word order, has a greater diversity of resources for FSP (cf. 1.10).

2.33 If the sentence is to be seen as a genuinely multifunctional unit, we must consider a wide range of factors influencing its organization. We need to transcend the traditional formal orientation looking only at units placed in certain positions and marked off by boundaries. A functional orientation can provide new insights into the selection and construction of such entities without being constrained to maneuver so narrowly along the borders of form (cf. 1.6, 8).

2.34 We can begin with Mathesius' portrayal of the sentence as a unit with a “point of orientation” (“vychodiste”) or “basis” (“zaklad”) and a “core” or “nucleus” (“jadro”). Although they have often been interpreted as such, these terms were not primarily positional or segmentational, i.e., were not meant to be names for elements or constituents of the sentence. Mathesius' original pair has been generally matched up with THEMA and RHEMA in Classical and Germanic studies and with THEME and RHEME in English studies. The pair TOPIC and COMMENT has been preferred by American linguists and their followers,{39}, who (as we might expect from section 1) have been the most determined to apply them to positions and segments, e.g., when Chomsky “defined the Topic” “as the leftmost NP [noun phrase] immediately dominated by S [Sentence] in surface structure and the Comment” as “the rest of the string” (cit. note 29, 23/68/70/163/230).

2.35 Some of these terms have appealing everyday senses that fit their technical senses only roughly. In popular parlance, “theme” and “topic” often refer to the subject matter or main idea of a discourse, and a clear counterpart term is lacking. “Comment” usually designates any remark indicating the speaker's own viewpoint about the subject matter, whereas “rheme” doesn't appear in everyday usage at all. A compromise might be in order: to select one term set for technical description and retain the rest in the commonsense usage. Since “theme” and “rheme” are evidently the most thoroughly explored terms in genuine functional research, I would favour (and have usually done so in my own writings) reserving them for FSP and using “topic” for general subject matter and “comment” for an incidental remark.

2.36 Both pairs of terms have been understandably associated with the familiar pair SUBJECT and PREDICATE. The latter are themselves multifunctional notions whose diffuse history points in at least three directions: grammar, logic, and psychology. In traditional descriptions, the standard practice has been to conflate the three, which seemed plausible enough as long as each example is so devised as to make them coincide. The coincidence allowed the ancient functional notion of a sentence as a unit in which something is made a “subject” and something is “predicated” about it --- compare Aristotles’ “hypokoimenon” (“the foundation”) and, “kategoroumenon” (“that said about it”), which he considered notions of “logic” -- to coexist alongside the formal notion of constituency between “noun phrase in subject position” and its “agreeing verb phrase in the predicate”.

2.37 Modern linguistics came to see distinct advantages in emphasizing non-coincidences. A famous instance, already cited (1.13), was Chomsky's much-touted observation that John is the grammatical subject in both (6) and (7), but the logical subject in (6) and the logical object in (7).{41}

(6) John is eager to please.

(7) John is easy to please.

His “transformational grammar” would derive (6) from John pleases someone and (7) from someone pleases John, these two being “kernel sentences” wherein grammatical and logical subjects once again coincide. In effect, such a grammar regards this coincidence as the most basic sentence formatting and all others as derived. A similar implication may apply to Chomsky's later notion of “deep structure”, which was said to be the home of “functional notions” like “logical Subject”, whereas “the so-called grammatical Subject” belonged to “surface structure”; here too, “a grammatical Subject may be a logical Object'“ (cit. note 29, 220f). Indeed, this kind of “difference” “provided the primary motivation and empirical justification for the theory of transformational grammar” (op. cit. 70).

2.38 Chomsky’s terms “logical Subject” and “Iogical Object” (the latter being a featured constituent of the “Iogical Predicate”) evidently designated the agent of an action and the entity affected by the action, respectively.{42} If a “logic” interpreted in its proper sense as “a ruIe system for determining new vaIues from known vaIues”, I see no strong reason to use the term “logical” here rather than “semantic”, the term preferred by many linguists anyway. Plausibly, Chomsky's appeals to “logic” were one tactic for including some semantic information in his grammar without designating it as such -- whence Danes' (cit. note 24, 226) verdict that “Chomsky apparently did not respect the difference between the grammatical and the semantic level in syntax”. Chomsky’s inclusion tactic resembled that of traditional grammar, which however made no claim to be “purely formal” (cf. 1.13).

2.39 The term “psychological subject” had a different tradition, due to the influence of nineteenth-century scholars like G. von der Gabelenz, H. Paul, and Ph. Wegener, and was carried over into the twentieth by the Czechoslovakian scholars J. Zubaty, V. Ertl, and F. Travnicek.{43} The “psychological subject” would be the idea the speaker has in mind as a starting point for creating a sentence, and the “predicate” would be the idea to be conveyed about this starting point. Such a notion resembles Mathesius' own conception (e.g. “vychodiste”) and a number of others we shall see later on. But the terms are now generally considered less appropriate or misleading, chiefly I think because “subject” and “predicate” are more pressingly needed for grammatical concerns.

2.40 The means of finding “subject”, “predicate”, and “object” did not seem problematic for traditional grammars with their orientation toward Latin, where we readily find a suitable nominative case, agreeing verb, and accusative case. The Latinate terms were reapplied to many modern languages, a practice which, with certain exceptions (e.g. Chinese and Japanese),{44} did not encounter large obstacles. A functional approach, however, cannot stop with the analysis of a sentence into “subject” and “predicate”, but must go on to inquire what functional criteria are involved in formatting the sentence and these two main constituents in this way rather than some other. Most linguists have no trouble taking a sample sentence and converting it into another grammatical format, e.g. active into passive. The new format may be a paraphrase of the old in terms of semantic content, but is very likely to differ in terms of FSP. Thus, an explicit and formal theory of paraphrase via reformatting, e.g. a “transformational grammar”, can only be one stage in an account of the functional relations between the alternative formats it describes (cf. 2.31). 

3. Thematic and rhematic as multifunctional aspects 

3.1 A productive way to survey FSP research might be to examine how sets of terms Can be aligned with the basic complementarity of thematic and rhematic. I have listed some prominent pairings in Table 1, with the left-hand term for thematic, and the middle term for the rhematic. The term in the right-hand column suggests the “dimension” along which the pair of terms might be situated. I should caution that some research focuses on just one such pair, while other research appeals to several pairs, often without specifying just how they agree or differ. Sometimes too, just one term of a pair is explicitly treated and the other is left implicit or mentioned only in passing.

3.2 The first pair, EARLIER versus LATER, is already open to a dual interpretation. The one favoured for a spoken sentence is the time dimension. Bolinger’s paper on “Linear Modification”, which was well received in Czechoslovakian research,{45} suggested that elements coming later are steadily more defined via those coming earlier. In his view, elements as they are progressively added one by one to form a sentence progressively limit the semantic range of all that has preceded; this causes beginning elements to have a wider semantic range than elements toward the end” (op. cit., li17). This progression seems reasonable, and adds another way to look at the “semantic structure” of the sentence besides those suggested by Dokulil, Danes, Firbas, Benes, and the Sgall group (cf. 2.13, 25ff). But we should consider recent cognitive findings that the operations of discourse production or comprehension need not be scheduled in the same time sequence as the positioning of elements, due to the use of global patterns like “schemas” (3.35). Moreover, the range of the beginning elements would usually be limited by those in preceding sentences within the same discourse. Still, Bolinger's notion of “semantic range” is a helpful reminder that meaning is at least partly indeterminate until it is actualised in communication and is, like FSP itself, a dialectic between virtual and actual (cf. 1.22f; 3.28).

3.3 The interpretation favoured for written language and in linguistics that relies on it is the position dimension. The spatial dimension of writing influences theoretical conceptualisation, e.g., when Benes distinguishes between “left-hand” and “right-hand contexts” (cit. note 33, 273). Some FSP researchers decided to define “theme” and “rheme” directly as positions, the theme always appearing before the rheme. This decision, adopted by Travnicek, Boost, and Halliday, but rejected by Firbas, Benes, Danes, Erben, and the Sgall group,{46} has at least two important implications. First, the selection of linguistic materials for the early stretch of a sentence is viewed as “thematizing”{47}, but the motives involved still require explanation. Second, the grammatical subject of the sentence is routinely expected to be thematic, and we must ask whether “non-thematic subjects are “peripheral” or whether they “are explainable by the same principles as thematic” (Firbas, cit. note 35, 240/253). Thus, the direct positional interpretation of “theme” and “rheme” does not by itself resolve the crucial issues and creates a fresh need for non-positional terms like “given” and “new” (cf. 3.24).

3.4 The second pair, FREQUENT versus RARE, seems simple enough -- we might just count elements and compare our totals. But numbers and statistics may not be helpful for so complex a phenomenon as language, where enumeration seldom constitutes explanation. No doubt the notion of “langue” should rest upon items and relations that occur frequently in “parole”; but I see no way to set a numerical cut-off point beyond which items cannot belong to “langue”. FSP compounds such problematics by diversifying the range of phenomena one might count.{48} We might define “thematic” elements as those which occur, either in form or meaning, more often throughout the discourse than the rest. Or we might assume we can intuitively identify thematic elements, and try to count how often they appear, say, in the position of grammatical' subject in a corpus of sentences. But the main task is still identifying and describlng the phenomena we decide to count. Like any formal or mathematical representations, statistics is productive only at the stage where we have a fairly reliable understanding of what we want to put into formal or quantitative terms (cf. 3.65f).

3.5 The third pair, STATIC versus DYNAMIC, is important because “the non-static dynamic character of language” is a “fundamental principle of the Prague School” (Danes, cit. note 2, 132). “It is exactly the emphasis laid on the dynamic nature of the system of language, together with its methodological implications and consequences, that might prove to be a contribution of some significance by the Prague group to the general context” of “language research” (Danes and Vachek, cit. note 19, 28). Moreover, “the designation 'functional sentence perspective’” itself serves to “appropriately indicate the active, ‘dynamic’ functioning of the semantic and grammatical sentence structures in the very act of communication” (Firbas, cit. note 38, 117). “What is for FSP of particular importance” is “the proper process of the dynamic building up of an utterance” and “of a supersentence discourse unit” (Benes, cit. note 33, 273). Danes' proposed “theory of utterance” (2.16) would cover “all that is concerned with the processual aspect of utterance in contrast to the : abstract and static character of the other two levels”, and would thus capture “the dynamism of relations between the meanings of individual lexical items in the process of progressive accumulation” and between “all other” “grammatical and semantic elements” (cit. note 24, 227). This “dynamism” “arises out of the semantic and formal tension and of expectation in the linear progression of the making-up of every utterance” (loc. cit.)

3.6 In tribute to “the fact that linguistic communication” is “a dynamic phenomenon”, Firbas introduced “the concept of communicative dynamism” (hereafter “CD”) for the type or degree of an element's “contribution to the development of the discourse” and to the “conveying” “of new information”.{49} “It is not possible to account for phenomena of this kind by means of a dichotomy”, but only “with a whole scale or hierarchy” with “different degrees of the thematic and rhematic character of sentence elements”.{50} So already in his early work (on Old and Modern English) Firbas envisioned “a long gamut of degrees of varying importance, of varying communicative dynamism” (cit. note 36, 73). “Instead of a strict partition”, “we arrive at an uneven distribution of CD over the sentence, assigning various degrees of thematicity or rhematicity to different sentence elements” (Danes, loc. cit.).

3.7 This scalar conception engendered appropriate terms. It became common to distinguish the elements of “lowest and highest CD” -- “the communicatively least” and “most important elements” -- as “the theme proper” and “the rheme proper” within the theme or rheme, respectively.{51} Also, a middle term appeared, namely the “transition”, which has “intermediate” “degrees of CD”. Although “transition cannot be linked up with mid-position, not being a word-order concept in the theory of FSP”, “transitional elements frequently do occur in this position” (Firbas, cit. note 21, 11/14) Predictably, it is “not always easy to draw an exact dividing line between and the transition and the theme on the one hand and the transition and the rheme on the other” (Firbas, cit. note-36, 72). The transition was an especially handy conception for treating verbal elements. For Firbas, “the chief (or rather probably only) conveyors of transition proper” are “the temporal and modal exponents of the verb” (cit. note 21, 11). The verb often figures in the transition for Sgall too, who saw in “the verb” a good “dividing line between contextually bound and non-bound parts of the sentence”.{52} He exempted the verb itself from scalar values: “it either is or is not contextually bound” (op. cit., 54). And in fact, I get the impression from the overall literature that FSP and CD are more relevant for nominal elements than for verbal, at least in English, where the verb is not so easily moved to the extreme front or back of a sentence as in Czech.

3.8 When the “word order”, which is “the most important means of FSP, is not interfered with by other phenomena, it creates” what Firbas called “the basic distribution of CD”: “starting with theme proper”, “running through the basic gamut”, and “finishing with the rheme proper”.{53} This “basic distribution of CD is a factor actually respected by language” and thus “seems to be a more suitable starting point for generating word orders than a primary grammatical sentence pattern” (Firbas, cit. note, 27, 36) (cf. 2.26). “It is not on the level of grammatical structure, but of FSP, that the communicative purpose of an utterance is decided by; grammatical structure” can be “the leading factor” among “word order principles, but only if it duly serves the communicative purpose of the utterance by not infringing on the requirements of FSP” (loc. cit.). If FSP is “superposed upon the semantic and grammatical structures”, then any “definite kind of perspective” “is the outcome of an interplay (tension) between the basic distribution on the one hand and of the context and the semantic structure of the sentence on the other” (Firbas, cit. note 35, 137). The “operation” of “context” “is especially obvious when it acts counter to the basic distribution of CD” (Firbas, cit. note 36, 74).

3.9 In a similar conception with different terms, Sgall proposed to distinguish between CD as “the actual hierarchy of elements in a sentence” and his already cited notion of “communicative importance” as “the hierarchy determined by the roles of participants” (cf. 2.27).{54} Ratings of this kind are interesting, though problematic, e.g.: “the so-called indirect (dative) object should be assigned lower communicative importance than the direct object”; or “provided the subject is known, the object, expressing the goal of an action will carry a higher CD than the verb expressing the action”, especially a “contextually independent object”; or “if both verb and object convey new information”, “the object” “will carry a higher degree of CD than its verb”, “regardless of their positions in the sentence” {55}.

3.10 Interesting too are classifications of whole sentence types in terms of the importance of their elements.{56} In the types called “existential” or “arrival on the scene”, e.g. (8) and (9), the verb is rated much less important than the agent” in actor-action types like (10), “the agent of the action is communicatively less important than the action,” while “the goal of the motion is more important than the motion, and the purpose” “is the most important of all”. For event-plus-setting types like (11), the “opening element”, “the setting, is naturally communicatively less important than the event”: the verb (mit) is “more dynamic” than the modal (budou) and the event (svatbu) is “an essential semantic amplification” of modal plus verb and has “the highest degree of CD”.

(8) Byl      jednou jeden kral.

    he-was once    one   king

  “There once was a king”

(9) Ozval     se    hvizd.

    sounded itself whistle

  “There came a whistle”

(10) Chuda selka               sla   do lesa  na stlani.

       poor    countrywoman went to forest for litter

   “A poor countrywoman went to the forest” for litter [i.e. animal bedding]

(11).U Jirsu   budou    mit   svatbu.

       at Jirsas they-will have wedding

    “At the Jirsas' place there will be a wedding"

Surely such ratings could be affected by contexts, interests, expectations, and so on. Perhaps the actual pattern and its CD rather than communicative importance in the abstract was affecting the ratings through the possible contexts imagined by the raters (cf. 3.67).

3.11 The Sgall group sees “two possibilities” (cit. note 29, 47) (cf. 2.27). Either “CD and communicative importance are in accordance”, namely “in sentences where no member” “is contextually bound” and in sentences “where all contextually bound members have a lower degree of communicative importance” than do the “non-bound” ones. Or, they “differ” because of the “deviating influence of context”, so that “a contextually bound element has a higher communicative importance” than some “non-bound” one. Note that Sgall's notion of “contextual boundedness” approaches the issue from the opposite side than Firbas' notion of CD, possibly on the assumption -- hard to prove but shared by others, e.g. Svoboda (3.13) -- that contextuality is more tractable than is dynamism.

3.12 We have thereby arrived at the fourth pair, CONTEXTUAL versus NON-CONTEXTUAL. Although both discourses and sentences must empirically occur in contexts, some FSP researchers have seen a genuine opposition here, witness the above-cited descriptions of the “grammatical” and the “semantic” (2.20f, 26). Benes' (cit. note 33, 271/267) supposition that “sentences” “may function as utterances (communications) even if they are completely isolated from the context and actual situation” supplies him with criteria not for discovering all sentences (as Danes suggested, 2.21), but for postulating a special class of “contextually independent sentences that are capable of appearing as free units”. These are assigned “primary importance for our analysis since they represent the basic type”, yet Benes concedes that such “sentences”, which “constitute the whole discourse and are affected neither by context nor by situation, occur, on the whole rarely” (op. cit., 267f). A theory in which the majority of occurring sentence units would be “non-basic” might seem anomalous, even though early “transformational grammar” with its “kernel sentences” was just such a theory (cf. 2.37). Besides, a single sentence which is the whole discourse would actually have to depend quite strongly on context and situation in order to be communicative.

3.13 A different proposal by Svoboda calls to mind Vachek's already cited “functional definition of the sentence” as “an elementary verbal act of taking a standpoint toward some reality” (2.11), and Firbas' prospect that the “the theory of FSP” concerns how “grammatical and semantic structures” “are “called up to convey some extra-linguistic reality reflected by thought” {57). Svoboda proposes that the “contextual dependence” of a “textual segment” might “be measured in terms of degrees of correspondence between the parts of extra-linguistic reality expressed by communicative elements” versus “that which is being taken as standpoint” (op. cit., 40). “Measuring contextual dependence” in some such way might “prove the validity” of a “theory of FSP” about “utterances within a context” (op. cit., 41>. In a full reversal of the direction suggested by Benes, Svoboda contemplated first finding the “laws of utterance organization” into “patterns” according to “the distribution of contextual dependence”, and then “generalizing over to utterances” that Iack “contextual dependence”.

3.14 Such measures raise a fresh problem in presupposing that we can access “reality” and its parts by other means than the textual segment and can recognize the “standpoint” from the outside. Such a recourse would be feasible at most for literal statements about the current discourse situation and even there far from simple, because discourse is a transaction for appropriating and organizing reality (2.25f). The decisive “dependence” is on the reality projected by this transaction, not on an independent prior reality (e.g. what would be recorded at that moment by a camera plus microphone).

3.15 The opposition between “contextual and “non-contextual” appears to be a non-dialectically interpreted by-product of the dialectic between “langue” and “parole” (cf. 1.22f). Like many others, Czechoslovakian linguists are inclined to postulate abstract “grammatical” and “semantic structures” wherever the organization of utterances does not seem to depend primarily on context (2.20). This inclination might imply that contextual influences are not systematic -- precisely what formalism asserts and functionalism denies. Functionally, context is always systemically based; it is impossible to create the needed grammatical and semantic resources on the spot. Just where this systemic basis shades over into momentary influences and pressures is a sensitive and complex borderline which cannot simply be built into one's definitions. At least FSP research seems more willing to contemplate this borderline than other linguistic schools. Appeals to non-contextual resources are therefore understandable but remain provisional until a fully dialectical viewpoint is established. When that occurs, conventional linguistic analysis of sentences will need to be reassessed. Even the functional analysis will be affected: instead of saying that “such and such a word or phrase is the theme of the sentence”, we would have to say that “the word or phrase is intended by the speaker and/or construed by the hearer in a thematic relation to the context”.

3.16 What has been qualified hitherto as “contextually independent” or “non-bound” consists of discourse materials whose integration in context is ongoing or prospective rather than achieved or retrospective.{58} The degree of CD corresponds to the effort required for this integration. The organization of “reality” may support the integration but cannot have so central a role as Svoboda suggests. The lesson for FSP research appears to be: our goal is not to construct “a range” of “perspectives” from “total contextual independence” over to “the greatest possible contextual dependence” (Firbas, cit. note 27, 28), but to examine how contextual dependence is progressively established, both prospectively and retrospectively, via particular means and strategies (cf. section 4).

3.17 The next set of pairs, 5-14 in Table 1, are context-related dimensions centring on content, the aspect (or “level”) FSP researchers usually call “semantic”. No pair is exactly synonymous with any other, despite some tendencies to use them interchangeably in the literature. Here is a typical demonstration with the relevant terms highlighted in upper case:

If I say my brother is ill to my friend who KNOWS that I have a brother, the theme of my utterance is my brother, and its nucleus, whereby something NEW is communicated to the listener, is ill [...] If the same utterance is directed to a person who has been INFORMED already that a member of my family got ill, the theme is expressed by the syntactic predicate, while the nucleus is represented by the subject. (Trnka, cit. note 18, 38).

Such demonstrations imply that discourse is an activity of filling in the gaps in other people's stores of true facts. The context would be the set of facts that are known to all participants at the current moment. This definition is both too strong, because people are often not aware of what facts others know; and too weak, because context includes not merely established facts, but inferences, assumptions, guesses, mere possibilities, and so on.

3.18 All the same, “it is necessary to use, in the description of the structure of sentences, some pragmatic data concerning the stock of knowledge shared by the speaker and the hearer”; “there is hardly any hope” for “a purely linguistic theory not operating with” “situations or stock of knowledge”.{59} To be sure, it is not yet clear how the usual intuitively convincing demonstrations can be replaced with a substantive theoretical or empirical groundwork (cf. 3.67; 4.27). “Knowledge” and “knowing” are not unified or unitary phenomena with clear-cut inner segments or outer boundaries. If something were entirely “unknown” it could not be understood; if something were entirely “known” it would have relate to simple, predetermined, and eternal facts, which are hard to find and certainly not the usual content of discourse. Discourse is a major mode for accessing and conveying knowledge, but also for producing it. For this reason, asking discourse participants to tell what they knew before and after a discourse (or even a single sentence) is a tricky operation likely to alter the very knowledge being reported.

3.19 “Knowledge of the world” has, however, after long banishment finally become an established concept in empirical research, notably in cognitive and social psychology.{60) Findings show that although such knowledge is multifarious and complicated, it is far from chaotic or unstructured. It is so finely organized that it can determine not merely what is I “known”, but also what is expected, normal, predictable, noteworthy, interesting, changeable, mutually relevant, and so on. The knowledge store is continually being modified, most obviously through communication but al so through experience and through the processes of the memory itself.

3.20 Cognitive research would support Sgall 's view of FSP serving the “basic property of communication that one of its participants, the speaker, attempt to make the other, the hearer”, modify” “some points of the information stored in memory”.{61} For this task, participants should “first identify the points that should be modified or” brought into a new relationship with others, and, second, specify the desired change, the new relationship, etc.” “The notion of contextual boundness corresponds directly” to these “points” and the “ways of modification attempted by the speaker through the message” (Sgall et al., cit. note 29, 25). “The required effort is smaller” if the points are “chosen as the established items by the speaker” and “the lexical items referring to them are marked as such”, e.g. by being placed at the beginning” (op. cit., 40).

3.21 Sgall 's account fits my description of “context” in 3.16 in giving the crucial role not to having knowledge, but to activating and modifving it. The context entails only the activated knowledge, not the person's entire store. However, activation has been shown to spread automatically to items associated in memory,(62) so that the context would have “fuzzy edges”, and a large amount of additional prior knowledge could be ready for immediate application.

3.22 A slippery question for semantics is the relation of knowledge expressed through language to the rest of knowledge. Linguists are prone to 'envision a demarcation that circumscribes their own concerns. For example, Sgall et al. “assume that the semantic representation corresponds not to the ontological (logical, cognitive) content of the sentence directly, but rather to its linguistic meaning” (op. cit., 74). He calls for “the formulation of such rules of interpretation” “leading from the linguistic meaning” to this “content”, as foreseen by “generative semantics” (cf. 1.13; 3.25). “The vast complex of phenomena connected traditionally with the heading 'semantics' is differentiated here” into content, meaning, the relationship between them, and relation of meaning to surface forms”. Similarly for Danes, “the semantic structure of the sentence” contains “only the linguistic relevant generalizations of concrete Iexical meanings”, “not the meanings themselves”: “such generalizations possess the form of abstract word categories (e.g. living being, individual, quality, action) or of relations between these categories”. These “relations”, which are “sometimes called logical” (2.26), “are derived from nature and society and appear to be essential for the social activities of man” (Danes, cit. note 24, 226). “The semantic categories” therefore “appear to be universal”, but they “are linguistically rendered in different languages differently” (op. cit., 226f) (cf. 1.7). Sgall et al. reject the notion of “a semantic structure common to all natural languages” while granting that “centuries of linguistic contact” can lead them to “coincide in the main properties of their semantic structure” (op. cit., 74f).

3.23 The linguistic factor also complicates the dimension of KNOWN versus UNKNOWN.{63} The typical, though not obligatory means of “activation” in Sgall 's sense is the presentation of “lexical units”. These themselves must be “known” so that their recognition can activate meanings, as must the strategies of combination (e.g. syntagmatic patterning). In this respect, the greater part of every message is known, and the extent of the unknown is comparatively minor. If the meanings of lexical units are fully integrated with other modes of knowledge organization, the automatic spreading of activation generates ongoing interactive patterns of knowledge which, in fine detail, are unique to that particular discourse situation and yet are sufficiently sharable that one participant can “know” what by signalling what is relevant or noteworthy among items of knowledge, FSP supplies controls to keep operations from being overflooded with associated knowledge through spreading activation. The key factor here is the current status of the knowledge, not its simple presence or absence in the mind or memory.

3.24 The same case can be made for the popular opposition between GIVEN (or OLD) versus NEW.{64} These terms may evoke an image of discourse as a transport of neatly-tied packages of facts, the new arrivals being stacked upon previous deliveries. The neatness may seem attractive, but camouflages the dynamics and complexity of the activity of “giving” and of the continual engagement with “newness”, which seldom involves genuine novelty. Knowledge may be activated and relevant not because one participant has already “given” it to another in the discourse, but because it is conventionally associated with whatever was given. And the knowledge is usually not “new” as such, but only its organization; in some cases, the only “newness” will be the removal of uncertainty about whether something expected is also uttered. Moreover, the opposition of “old and new information” clouds the time dimension with a fictional dividing point, which would be constantly transcended by mental processing, especially in discourse, through retrospection and prospection (3.16). In sum, “the contextual determination of givenness” is “a graded” and “far from simple phenomenon”, arising from “direct or indirect mention”, “identical wording”, “synonymous expression”, “paraphrase”, “inference”, “implication”, and a wealth of “associative relations” (Danes cit. note 46, 109).

3.25 The pair PRESUPPOSED versus ASSERTED, coming from philosophy and logic, addresses the difference between what is being stated and what is being implied or taken for granted. The notion of presupposition has been favoured among generative linguistics, which is oriented toward logic and needs criteria for capturing delicate structural nuances in issues like quantification, negation, and passivization. Under pressure from competitors like “generative semantics”, Chomsky “extended” his “standard theory, which had sought to explain the structure of sentences only through a “grammar” and their meaning only through a “lexicon”, by introducing the notions of “presupposition” and “focus”.{65) Since he proposed to determine “focus” from the intonation pattern (we examine this dimension later, 3.53f), he situated the issue in “surface structure” (cf. 2.10, 35, 37). Generative semantics scored a major point by showing that “deep structure” had to be involved in order to formulate the proper rules and constraints.{66}

3.26 The Sgall group, attempting to integrate FSP research with the generative paradigm, re-examined the issue carefully from the Czechoslovakian functional standpoint and found that “the use of a sentence is restrained by the bound segment” “more strictly than by the genuine presuppositions: the elements of the topic are not only presupposed (this may be the case even with elements of the focus), but they must belong to those elements in the stock of shared knowledge that have been activated in the given point of discourse” (op. cit., 164f). As I suggested (3.23), linguistic elements and their meanings are presupposed before communication starts; the question is whether the relevant knowledge organization is shared by the participants. What is usually labelled “presupposition” is an unstated assertion which is imported into the context with the least possible notification but which becomes critical under the scrutiny of deterministic formal analysis. The most interesting cases are those where the prior knowledge organization is not shared, but imposed by the speaker to steer the context without seeking consensus.{67}

3.27 Pairs 9-13 in Table 1 have not figured in FSP literature very prominently, but may help to explore the issues from further angles. EXPECTATION is related to INFORMATION in its modern statistical sense, but only indirectly. In the “information theory” going back to Shannon and Weaver, the information carried by an element is gauged by the statistical “transition probability” of its occurrence after its predecessor, and this probability is computed from the frequency of this transition within the set of all recorded transitions from that one element to any other. In discourse, however, these measures are hardly relevant because participants use grammatical and semantic patterns and structures for arranging elements in whole groups, not one by one. We thus need to relate information value mere directly to unexpectedness within the current context.{68} In a functional approach, expectations would apply to each level as well as to their correlations and would contribute to the “dynamism” “arising out of the semantic and formal tension and of expectation in the linear progression. (3.5). The usual demonstrations of rhematicity and CD, however, suggest that the central type of unexpectedness in ordinary sentences is semantic, while syntactic unexpectedness applies only to non-ordinary sentences wherein displacements have the function of indicating emphasis, contrast, and so on (cf. 3.47, 56).

3.28 The pair DETERMINATE versus INDETERMINATE has been regrettably neglected in linguistic theory at large.{69} This neglect reflects the deterministic notion of the language system formulated by Saussure and documented by phonology (1.15). This same notion creates harrowing problems in formalist and structuralist semantics when they attempt to describe meaning as a determinate phenomenon at the system level. Functionalist semantics is much more compatible with the thesis that meaning attains determinacy only in context, and even there a relative rather than an absolute degree (cf. 3.2). Perhaps FSP and CD could be formulated as phenomena produced by creating and removing indeterminacy in discourse. Elements rated low in CD are those for which a fairly high determinacy is attainable from context and situation; the converse obtains for those rated high in CD. Since semantics is the least determinate level, the aforementioned emphasis on semantic unexpectedness is quite appropriate.

3.29 However, this formulation of CD raises a principled objection against the commonplace analysis of isolated sentences, whereby indeterminacy is artificially raised. The analyst then faces a more demanding task of imposing determinacy in some plausible commonsensical way. For example, Trnka’s reading of my brother is ill (3.17) hinges on his own imagined scenario of a known brother and a not-known illness; he doesn’t/t consider its use, say, as a answer to a question like Are you leaving on your vacation today? asked by someone who knows nothing about brothers nor illnesses (cf. 3.62).

3.30 The everyday senses of DEFINITE and INDEFINITE might readily be matched with “determinate” and “indeterminate”. But the grammatical senses are more complex and problematic, because the main indicators, the so-called “articles” are multifunctional (1.11). The original formulation offered by the Soviet linguist B. Ilyish in 1948 and taken up by Firbas proved too simple: “The indefinite article turns the substantive into the semantic predicate [for Firbas the rheme] of the sentence, whereas the definite article deprives it of this possibility”. In the revised and translated edition of 1965, Ilyish preferred to say: “the indefinite article will of course tend to signal the new element. In the sentence” whereas “the definite article will in general tend to point out that which is already known, that is the theme”.{70} Favoured illustrations have been the “existential” and “appearance on the scene types” like (12) and (13) (e.g. girl rhematic, room thematic) (cf. 3.10). But “the indefinite article is not rhematic in all situations”, as Firbas (op. cit, 242) notes; “the generic indefinite article” (“referring to the entire genus”) is a major exception, e.g., in Robert Burns’ line (14).

(12) There once was a king.

(13) A girl came into the room.

(14) A man’s still a man for all that.

(15) The girl came into the room.

(16) The girl came into a room.

(17) A girl came into a room.

(18) A girl broke a vase.

(19) A girl broke the vase.

(20) The girl broke a vase.

3.31 A helpful point is Firbas observation (loc. cit.) that “the indefinite article” can “mark a substantive as insufficiently determined”. Sample (13) could suggest that the identity of the “girl” is indeterminate at the moment, whereas (15) could suggest the contrary. If either sentence occurred as a text beginning, e.g. of a story, the room in (13) could indicate the location of the narrator seeing the event (from the inside, hence , not went), and the girl in (15) could indicate that the hearer or reader will soon find out her identity. (16) could indicate that the girl is thematic, but could also project a view of the action as seen by her rather than by a narrator already in the room. (17) seems the oddest because the articles do not help us either to identify a theme or to adopt a point of view; in a story, we could only wait and see. We might conclude from such cases that the indefinite article can signal indeterminacy for various reasons: (a) because exact identity is not relevant (as in generics); (b) because the speaker intends to specify identity later on; (c) because the entity is not indicated as orientation for a point of view; (d) because a entity is just being introduced onto the scene; and so on.

3.32 The “existential” and “appearance on the scene” types of sentence are so popular in discussions of definiteness because they allow us to introduce entities apparently free from prior context. The verb is conveniently unobtrusive, and the “existential” there illustrates “the lowest (almost zero) degree of CD” (Firbas, cit. note 30, 275) Sentences with “verbs of action” are more prone to take indefinite subjects that are not rhematic, as in (18); in Firbas' view “it is natural that attention should be concentrated less on the agent and more on the goal of the action” (cf. 3.10) (cit. note 35, 243). But attention can be affected by interest or salience depending on content and context, e.g., on one's reactions to breaking a vase. If (18) occurred in a conversation about events at my party last week, narrating the whole event could take precedence over establishing the identity of either agent and goal. In the same conversation, (19) and (20) could also report the event, but could imply either that the hearer should know which vase and girl were involved, or else that there was only one at the scene.

3.33 Such considerations suggest that FSP concerns the general construction of whole scenes from certain “perspectives”, not merely of new “appearances”. Firbas (loc. cit.) offered the. term “narrow scene” for the “ad hoc context at the moment of utterance” and Sgall et al. (op. I cit., 70) helpfully relate the term to the “activated elements” in the “stock of shared knowledge”. “The notion conveyed by the noun accompanied by the definite article may be known, well determined, familiar yet in regard to the narrow scene it may appear as unknown, new” (Firbas, op. cit., 246) (cf. 4.5). In other cases, “substantives with definite articles” can convey notions “familiar” both in “common knowledge” and the “narrow scene” (loc. cit.).

3.34 The pair CONSTANT versus VARIABLE, though common in linguistics with an algebraic orientation (e.g. Hjelmslev's “glossematics”), has played no main role in FSP research,{7l} but can be relevant both to definiteness and to knowledge organization at large. The definite article is apt for constants like the earth and the sun, but also for a stable point of view, e.g. the room. The indefinite is likely to indicate variable identity, e.g. for girl and room in (17). The concept or content may be known and familiar even where the identity remains variable. For (12), a world could be imagined with many kings but only one is relevant to the story. A text-beginning like The king was in his counting-house tends to narrow the scene to only one king. In principle, variables are likely to enhance CD both when they are introduced and when their identity is established.

3.35 The pair SCHEMATIC versus NON-SCHEMATIC comes from research on COGNITION and MEMORY. The “schema” is an organized pattern of stored knowledge, usually one which suggests both what items of knowledge belong together and in what sequence they would normally be encountered (see note 60; 3.2). As soon as a schema is activated, schematic knowledge will be available to support the thematicity of certain elements, whereas rhematicity will apply to knowledge which is either unrelated to the schema, or, for high CD, contradicts it. Schemas also are said to have “constants” which always apply unless expressly denied, and “variables” which are usually not set until the schema is put to use.

3.36 The pair OBJECTIVE versus SUBJECTIVE is familiar enough in EPISTEMOLOGY as a contrast between external versus internal access to knowledge. Both kinds of access are involved in virtually every appropriation of knowledge, but explicit avowals of the one or the other belong to the scenarios of certain discourse domains, e.g., science versus art. “Objective criteria for determining theme and rheme” have also been a desideratum in FSP research (cf. 3.61).

3.37 As terms applied directly to the analysis of sentences, Mathesius associated the “subjective” with “emphatic and emotive sentences”, and the “objective” with the “neutral” counterpart.{72} But Firbas (cit. note 38, 120) counsels against “invariably identifying subjective with emotive word order”. Or, Svoboda proposed to align “the concept of CD” both with “the objective information amount carried by language elements” and with the “subjective information” determined by the “personal approach” and “intention of a language user” (cit. note 57, 39). “The ideal case would be to measure the relative or the absolute amounts of both subjective and objective information”, but Svoboda justly finds the “probability” of being able to do so “very low” in “the present stage” of “information theory” (cf. 3.27).

3.38 This last pair has moved us away from the dimensions more concerned with content toward the dimensions more concerned with the participants' perception and presentation. Whereas content-oriented pairs tend to centre on the thematic, these pairs (15-24) tend to attribute more importance to the rhematic as the outcome or signal of the speaker's intent to raise the prominence of certain elements over others. We are thus more directly concerned with the motives for adopting or identifying a certain perspective and confront a fresh series of problems. A speaker might want to highlight certain expressions because they are important, interesting, novel, unexpected, contrastive, salient, emotionally charged, and so an. Such motives may coincide or may compete. The motives are often not made an explicit topic for explanation and negotiation. The speaker may be unaware of them, or may be aware of them but may wish to disguise them. The hearer's assessment of motives may not match the speaker's own. For reasons like these, the question of motive bears on the most complex aspects of discourse organization in general and of FSP in particular.

3.39 For the pair GROUND versus FIGURE from GESTALT theory, motives are still relatively neutral: perception must be organized by selective distribution of focus simply because everything cannot be focussed all at once. Similarly, theme and rheme are necessary for efficient organization of discourse content, whether or not the participants have the express intention of steering the focus. This efficiency is most crucial when the content is genuinely unfamiliar or creative -- a factor not likely to become clear as long as we rely on isolated invented sentences with trivial content, e.g., samples (12) through (20).

3.40 For the pair BACKGROUND versus FOREGROUND, deriving from Prague school aesthetics, explicit intention is more prominent. To support what Mukarovsky called the “aesthetic function” -- an addition to Buhler's scheme of functions (see 2.5 and note 22) -- the language material, which is ordinarily in the background because it is known and presupposed, is “foregrounded”.{73) Influenced by the poetry of the Czechoslovakian national re-emergence in the nineteenth century, Mukarovsky considered deviant language, such as solecisms or archaisms, an important tool of foregrounding or “deautomatization”. But the key factor, I have argued (cit. note 14), is the disposition to intensify one's contemplation, whether or not the language seems deviant.

3.41 In FSP work, Sgall has deployed the term “foregrounded knowledge” quite differently for the “elements” that are “activated in the situation as given in a certain time point of the discourse” (cit. note 29, 39; Sgall et al., cit. note 29, 40). This conception, which he compares to Firbas’ “notion of the narrow scene” (3.33), “might be useful also for studies of the structure of a text “, e.g., to see how the foreground “changes due to a break: in the fluent line of discourse”. In Sgall 's wide usage, the “foreground” is set against the background of stored but not activated knowledge, whereas in Mukarovsky's more constrictive usage, the “foreground” is set against activated but non-focussed or inconspicuous elements being processed automatically.

3.42 The contrast between Sgall and Mukarovsky can be aired in respect to the pair of ORDINARY versus NON-ORDINARY. The elements Mukarovsky considered essential for blocking “automatic” perception would be non-ordinary in some absolute sense, deviating markedly in form or frequency from the norm of the language system. The discourse domain he emphasized, namely poetry, is already a non-ordinary one wherein the foregrounding would be a second-stage intensification. Other discourse domains closer to everyday language, in contrast, would allow for first-stage foregrounding, e.g., through elements which do not normally belong to that domain. FSP and CD can of course apply to language use which does not depart from the ordinary at all, witness the banality of the sentences typically selected for demonstrations.

3.43 Still, concepts like “basic distribution of CD” (3.8) suggest that some means for FSP are more ordinary than others. A word-order with steadily rising CD is quite ordinary in Czech (cf. 2.28, 32). In English, we can easily acknowledge that sentence patterns like these (Mathesius' examples) are not ordinary:

(21) Long live the king!

(22) These great men we trust that we know how to prize.

(23) Therefore have we linked ourselves to the only Party that promises us the boon we seek.

But to determine the communicative status of such patterns (e.g. their potential for “foregrounding”), we need to assess ordinariness with respect to register as well as to the overall language. Samples like (21-23) are typical of ritual or ceremonial registers wherein they might seem ordinary enough and receive no special focus. Usage outside such registers would get much stronger focus but would also be relatively rare.

3.44 The pair UNMARKED versus MARKED has been the most widely accepted dimension for handling ordinariness. According to Halliday (cit. note 47,213), the “marked option” draws its “effectiveness” from “contrasting with the unmarked” option which requires “less motivation” and is therefore selected unless there is specification to the contrary”. In this view, markedness is always context-sensitive, because only context can indicate what options are at stake and what motivations might apply. As such, the concept is highly useful in pointing to the crucial dialectic between system and process, or virtual and actual (cf. 1.22f): what is chosen depends of course on the overall repertory, but its value at that moment depends on the repertory of whatever might be chosen there, i.e. on an active and relevant subset of the overall repertory. The mental status of “the speaker's knowledge of the language” (“competence”) adduced by formalists of the generative direction could thus be clarified: language knowledge is integrated with the speaker's general knowledge of the world, but as a special organizational principle (or set of principles) for selective activation and selection. Only a small part of the language knowledge would be active at any time, namely the network of relevant options associated with active general knowledge (content, meaning etc.) and thus already partially accessed by spreading activation (3.21, 23).

3.45 This outlook calls for a description of language in terms of such networks to acts as the functional complement of descriptions in terms of levels sorted by unit type and size (cf. 2.29). I see no grounds to suppose that these networks need be subdivided by level; on the contrary, such subdivisions could impair efficient processing. The criteria for activation and selection would have to be primarily functional, not formal or categorical, driven by thresholds of relevance rather than by abstract equivalences and differences (let alone binary oppositions, 1.19, 23).

3.46 Danes concurs with Halliday that “the unmarked case” is the “association of the theme with the given”, and emphasizes the need to “differentiate between ‘known’ and ‘theme’”.{74} Understandably, FSP research has devoted much attention to “deviations from unmarked word order” (Firbas, cit. note 38, 119). Indeed, a new means of classification might be derived: grouping “sentence types” that “are structured differently on the level of FSP” together if “they deviate in one and the same way from unmarked word order”, e.g. “through the marked pre-subject position of the element performing the function of the finite verb”. Such a class would include “archaic wish-clauses”, e.g. (21), but also May the king live long.{75}

3.47 Markedness is closely related to the dimension of EMPHASIS. For Mathesius (cit. note 72, 175), a special “set of principles” applies to “emphatic speech”. The term “emphasi”; or “emphatic” has appeared sporadically ever since (e.g. Dahl cit. note 29), but applied to various phenomena. The widest consensus obtains for the thesis that “the deviation from unmarked” “order” “creates emphatic word order”, typicaIly “rheme - theme”, “in Czech” as well as “in English” (Firbas, cit. note 38, 119; Sgall, cit. note 29, 16).

3.48 Firbas (op. cit., 117), however, proposed to replace Mathesius' “principle of emphasis with the “principle of EMOTION”, noting that “strongest emphasis” is not “indispensable for marking word order as emotive”. Weil's early study had used the term “pathetic” for “word order” which “puts the goal of the discourse first” and the “point of departure” or “initial notion last”, and had “looked upon it as a vehicle of emotion”.{76} Mathesius had associated “emphatic” with “agitated” and “emotive” (cit. note 72, 175). “The most unemotive order” would be to “proceed from what is known to what is unknown” (Firbas, cit. note 36, 72). The more the “word order” “deviates from” “the basic distribution of CD”, the more “emotive (marked)” it becomes (Firbas, cit. note 30, 273). In “Czech word order, FSP operates as the chief principle” for “both emotive and unemotive” (Firbas, cit. note 36, 73). But “in English”, Mathesius concluded, “there are not enough means” “to put all the non-emotive” “sentences into the theme-rheme order” (1942, cit. note 72 188; cf. Firbas, cit. note 35, 1) (cf. 2.32).

3.49 Admittedly, the dimension of emotion is no easier to define than that of emphasis. The relations between language and emotion have hardly been a major concern for linguistics, the more so as the chief and most consensual mode of expressing emotions is facial rather than linguistic; and research in other fields indicates that emotions do not constitute a unitary phenomenon, and their classification is problematic.{77} Nor is it plausible that all emotions, e.g. surprise, anger, fear, or anxiety (cf. Mathesius' “agitation”) would have the same effects upon FSP. Consequently, the notion of “emotive word order” requires more explication before its relevance to FSP can be properly assessed.

3.50 The dimension of FOCUS is better defined, namely in theories of perception as the selective activity of devoting one's resources (e.g. visual fixation) to one element or aspect rather than another. It is also widely used in FSP research. Halliday attributes “a distinct constituent structure” to “the distribution of information” according to the “point of information focus” that indicates “where the main burden of the message lies” (cit. note 47, 200-205). “Within each” “unit”, “elements” are selected as “points of prominence”: “one primary point of information focus”, and possibly a “secondary” one for “dependent”, “incomplete, contingent, or confirmatory” “information” (op. cit., 203, 209). The “structure” is “realized” in a “natural, (non-arbitrary)” way, with “the New marked by prominence” and “typically” placed after “the Given” (cit. note 6, 275) (cf. 3.24). In this account, “information” seems more content-oriented (what seems unpredictable or unexpected), whereas “focus” seems more speaker-oriented (what to highlight) (cf. 3.59). Focusing on the unpredictable or unexpected is normal, though not obligatory.

3.51 In Czechoslovakia, the Sgall group (cit. note 29, 56) uses “focus” for “the non-bound part of the sentence” as opposed to “the bound segment” -- a definition more in positional than in cognitive or psychological terms. Whereas “the order of contextually bound elements” reflects “differences in CD”, “the order of elements inside the focus is (as a rule, if not always) given by the semantic roles of the participants” (i.e. communicative importance, 2.27, 3.9ff), at least “with normal intonation” (op. cit., 64f). K. Hausenblas, on the contrary, describes “the theme” as what has been posited to the fore, into the focus of the field of vision and at the same time presents a foundation to be developed (elaborated) in the subsequent discourse”.{78}

3.52 Dimensions like “foregrounding” and “focus” might be reassessed in connection with recent psychological research on AUTOMATIC versus ATTENTIONAL PROCESSING.{79} The attentional type is operationally defined as that which consumes resources and competes with the performance of other such processes; the automatic type is non-competitive. The threshold of' attention, however, is substantially lower than is indicated by such terms as “focus” and “deautomatization” in Czechoslovakian research. Elements presented or perceived as high in CD are likely to enter conscious awareness and thereby attain a high degree of “attention” in the psychological sense. However, it would be valuable to determine, e.g. by comparing the findings on pupil-fixation times, whether rhematic or focussed elements are routinely fixated longer or more often than others.{80}

3.53 The dimension of “focus”, especially for Firbas and Halliday, is closely associated with INTONATION, a dimension sometimes called PROSODY (e.g. by J.R. Firth and Firbas). Whereas an abstract systemic viewpoint works well for phonology, a functional viewpoint is needed to understand the intonational or prosodic contours of human speech. For this reason, several linguists who made major contributions to the study of intonation and prosody, such as Danes, Bolinger, Halliday, and Firbas,{81} were also pioneers in functional research. Halliday for example cited “intonational and rhythmic structure” among the factors “to be accounted for in a functional grammar” (cit. note 6, 286).

3.54 STRESS (also called “prosodic weight”) is the most tangible factor of intonation, allowing the latter to be distinguished more easily than other dimensions of CD. Stress technically falls on a “nucleus”: “a fully stressed syllable which stands out from among its neighbours” “in that it displays, at least through imitating it, a change of pitch direction”;{82} but FSP work often shows stress for whole words, viz. the upper case transcription of the Sgall group and others (shown in 3.56, 61).{83}.

3.55 “As can be gathered from works on intonation, rheme is most naturally signalled by the nucleus” (Firbas, cit. note 21, 20). A sentence with an “unstressed theme” “is likely to show a “coincidence between the gamut of prosodic weight (unstressed - partially stressed - stressed - bearing a nucleus) and the gamut of CD (theme proper – rest of theme – transition proper – rest of transition – rest of rheme – rheme proper)” (cf. 3.7). A lack of “coincidence” can be “made up for the co-operation of non-prosodic means” (op. cit., 22).

3.56 Demonstrations often suggest that any word can be stressed in any position, provided a special motive applies. The best known motive is CONTRAST, wherein the stressed word repudiates an alternative possibility, e.g.:{84}

(24a) The man was not smoking a black CIGARETTE but a black cigar.

(24b) The man was not smoking a BLACK cigarette but a white cigar.

(24c) The man was not SMOKING a black cigarette, he was chewing it.

These demonstrations may be a bit artificial, but the interaction of stress with contrast is beyond all doubt. “The mere increase of prosodic weight can be crucial for “correcting some misunderstanding” (Sgall et al., cit. note 29, 21) or clearing up some noticeably indeterminate point.

3.57 Contrastive sentences were called by Bolinger “second instance” because they “imitate the structure of those sentences with which they are being contrasted, no matter whether these have really been uttered or merely exist in writer/speaker’s and reader/hearer's mind”.{85} “Any word may function as a rheme in these sentences, even such as otherwise serves as a thematic means” (Firbas, cit. note 36, 75). “The second-instance subsphere” includes “all possible variations” whereby “different contexts lead to different ad hoc oppositions” (Firbas, cit. note 21,17). This variability indicates why scholars might “deal only with first instance” “unless expressly stated”, or confine “the second instance” to “extreme cases” with “a minimum amount of contextually unaffected” “content”, or “leave it out of consideration” altogether. (86)

3.58 Still, a “useful purpose” can be served “by an inquiry into the second instance applicability of a linguistic unit”, namely, as an occasion to “explore the structure of the semantic content”.{87} In that “the unit is simultaneously opposed to one like unit in particular and to all like units in general” (op. cit., 18), the conditions of opposition and likeness come into view in a far more operational way than in Saussurian argument (cf. 1.19, 23), and suggest a measure of complexity. “The more complex the semantic structure of the unit, the more numerous its uses in second instances” (e.g. in Allwood’s catechism (24a-c), smoking as compared to the or was). “Except for the single element that stands in contrast”, “the second instance” “is as a whole contextually bound” (Sgall et al., cit. note 29,32), but of course contrast itself can be operative only in a well-circumscribed context.

3.59 The pair SPEAKER-ORIENTED and HEARER-ORIENTED seems a bit incongruous in respect to the other pairs, since both PARTICIPANTS can recognize both theme and rheme. But for Halliday, “thematic structure is speaker-oriented” (“what I am talking about”), whereas “information focus is listener-oriented” (“what I am asking you to attend to”) (compare note 6, 278/316/368) (cf. 3.50). We might view thematizing as the speaker's acknowledgement of what has thus far been established as topic or subject matter, and rhematizing as the speaker's request for the hearer to acknowledge something not previously established.{88}

3.60 Incongruous again is the pair QUESTION and ANSWER, which are of course complete utterances or discourse moves, not elements, positions, or aspects like theme and rheme. But an implicit parallelism pervades FSP research, namely in the widespread recognition of consistent thematic-rhematic relations in questions and answers, e.g. in languages like English and German. When a question is posed and an answer is to be formulated, or when an already presented statement is to be challenged by a question, FSP is a strategic consideration for selecting a focus A yes/no question may have as focus the whole statement, while a wh-question focuses only certain elements. Reciprocally, a statement will seem appropriate as answer to a question if it focuses the material or content the question specifically asks for.

3.61 Such relations account for the popularity of the “question test”, hailed as an “objective” and “operative” means to “determine the distribution of CD in the sentence”.{89} The theme or topic or bound segment of the sentence will normally “comprise only the elements that are present in the question” (Sgall et al., cit. note 29, 34/50). A typical case, with the focus (the rheme proper) indicated by typographical emphasis, would be (op. cit., 51):

(25a) The astronauts brought samples of minerals from the MOON.

(25b) What did the astronauts do?

(25c) What did the astronauts bring?

(25d) From where did the astronauts bring samples of minerals?

(25e) What did the astronauts bring from the moon?

 (25f) The astronauts brought SAMPLES OF MINERALS from the moon.

In each case, the theme of the original (25a) can be determined from what is found in the question, and the rheme is what the question asks for: the whole action (25b), the object of the action (25c), or the location (25d). (25e) would be an inappropriate question for (25a), which focuses something the questioner would have plainly established; (25f) would be a fitting answer for (25e). As such cases show, “the same sentence can be probed with several questions” to suit “communicative perspectives linked to different contexts and situations” (Danes, cit. note 89, 73f, m.t.). “As sentences, the questions themselves are not always limited in their contextual applicability to one degree of contextual dependence only” (Firbas, cit. note 31, 144).

3.62 Nonetheless, Danes surmises that “every statement can be assigned a set of questions that represent all possible types of context and thus all conceivable communicative perspectives” (cit. note 89, 74, m. t., and note 46, 115). Sgall too “assumes that the user of the language can decide on the basis of his linguistic competence whether a given sentence can or cannot be an answer to a certain question”, and follows that “for every sentence it is possible to give a set of questions which can be appropriately answered by the given sentence” (cit. note 29, 28f). But it is doubtful that the question test can be so complete or exhaustive. Even a simple sentence like Trnka’s my brother is ill might fit not only questions like who is ill? and how’s vour brother? but how’s the familv? or what's the matter with you? or why are you late?, and so forth (cf. 3.17, 29). To the extent that the range of possible contexts is open, so is the set of possible questions for a sentence.

3.63 In Danes' (cit. note 89, 74) view, the question test “determines theme and rheme only in rough outlines” but “has great advantages in being simple and purely linguistic”{90} and combining “thematic and contextual” “aspects”. Yet as we just saw, question-answer relations can be situational as well as “linguistic”, though they correlate the linguistic forms of sequences quite plausibly in straightforward cases. Moreover, the question test can intervene in the FSP and CD as well as probe it. Posing a question after the fact differs from making a statement in response to an already posed question asked in that the former case implies a higher degree of challenge and a lower degree of informativity. Whether speaker or hearer, the person taking the initiative to formulate is also the one who determines factors like stress, emphasis, and emotion.

3.64 Firbas makes the intriguing suggestion that “to be fully adequate”, “the question schema” should “conform to the three-level approach”, although “this requirement will render the schema rather unwieldy” (cit. note 31,144). Like Danes, Firbas here recognizes the multifunctionality of sentences, in this case question-answer pairs, as the result of the contributions of several levels, all of them, including “syntax”, functionally defined (2.13ff). Functionally, however, a question-answer pair is already far more complex than a single sentence, because eliciting an answer-sentence is only one possible function of a question-sentence. The question may have such effects as causing the speaker to hesitate, stumble, fall silent, grow self-conscious, confused, or angry, and so on; and such effects may be just what the questioner intended. To take these effects into account, the scheme of levels summarized in 2.13ff would need to be expanded with a more general and differentiated perspective on the participants’ intentions and attitudes.

3.65 Though the question test by itself will manifestly not suffice, FSP research has not yet agreed upon the means for supplementing it. Some researchers (e.g. Dahl and Allwood, cit. notes 29 and 54) have appeared to imagine that FSP can be accounted for if “the necessary components for description of any language” “can be specified with regard to the standard methods used in the description of the artificial languages of logic and mathematics.{91} The well-known logician and text-grammarian J.S. Petofi recommends “formalization” as a means whereby “the complete system of grammatical knowledge regarding text structures can be completely and explicitly captured in rules”.{92} He is optimistic that “if a regularity is explicitly formulated in words, the formulation is not far from a formalization, albeit, paradoxically, harder to handle than a formalized regularity”. Specifically, Uhlirová suggests that “efficient generative rules should be capable of coping with the contextual applicability of a sentence structure” (cit. note 48, 209).

3.66 According to the arguments developed in section 1, however, formalization of a natural language sample is never antecedent but always consequent to functional appropriation by the formalizer. As long as this appropriation is not accounted for, the resulting formalism remains a specialized artefact rather than a general explanation. Petöfi is quite right that a verbal statement is harder to handle than a formalization, but the distance between them is far greater and more substantive than he suggests. And one chief difference between an actual utterance and any formalization of it is a pronounced functional disparity. For example, “logical formulae” do not “distinguish the relevant points of previous knowledge”; and “the semantic structure of the sentence differs from a logical formula in that it is a unit adapted to functioning in the communication” (Sgall, cit. note 29, 26; Sgall et al., cit. note 29, 10f). Everything depends on how the formalizer moves between the data and the' formalism, and this movement is not “specified in the standard methods of logic and mathematics”. Nor do I see how it could be specified there; instead, we would need to negotiate functional methods to reflect average persons' functional appropriation of the data as utterances rather than formulas.

3.67 As a more empirical resource, Benes (cit. note 33, 269) suggested “tests based on the linguistic feeling of informants” who could be “asked which word order they would choose in a particular context or which they would probably use without any context”. Pala for instance described a context and asked informants to compose a following sentence from supplied lexical material; Ulvestad, in contrast, presented alternative arrangements of the same sentence and asked informants which ones they could imagine in any context to be good, possible, or impossible.{93) As Benes (op. cit., 274) remarked, “Ulvestad claimed to disregard meaning” but actually “transferred guessing at the possible meaning to the imagination of his subjects”. No doubt some guessing is likely to be needed for any determination of FSP; the challenge would be to describe how people, including linguists, go about making their guesses. 

4. Functional text perspective?

 4.1 Problems with current empirical demonstrations and the unsettled search for new ones I indicate that significant further progress will require some revisions in the theory of FSP. The most crucial revision, long since on the agenda, is to expand from a sentence perspective to a text perspective. The Sgall group's claims (cit. note 29, 150/157/159) that linguistics of texts would be based on linguistics of sentences, e.g. as the study of “sequences of sentences” seem obsolete today. Indeed, most of the problems I have pointed out in FSP research plausibly arose from insufficient consideration of textual factors. However, the broad multifunctional conceptions of the “sentence” in FSP work has already brought into view far more textual factors than the usual formal conceptions. To be sure, a text is a multifunctional unit to an even greater extent than is the sentence. Text linguists would thus go further than Danes, for whom “a text is a linkage of minimal statements [Aussagen], i.e., of sentences that are fitted to a certain context and situation” (cit. note 89, 72, m.t.). We would prefer a more general and flexible definition, the more so since the criteria of “minimalness” are empirically intractable, and “statement” is only one type of discourse move we find in texts.

4.2 Another revision, programmatically announced by Danes, is a more text-oriented conception of “theme”. Danes pointed out the significance of the “thematic progression of relations in the text” as a “scaffolding of text construction” and identified the “four most frequent types” (cit. note 89, 74, and note 46, 118ff). In a “simple linear progression”, “the rheme of the preceding sentence becomes the theme of the following one”. A “continuous theme” appears in several sentences in a row, each having a new rheme. In a “progression with derived themes”, the latter develops “an implicit 'hypertheme' covering, say, a whole paragraph”. “A split rheme becomes a theme partially developed in each of several subsequent sentences”. “A thematic leap occurs when a link that can be easily supplied from context is omitted in the thematic chain”. More work with diverse texts is required here, since Danes warns that “these types usually do not appear in pure form in actual texts and can be combined in diverse ways” (cit. note 89, 78f). Also, we need to inquire “whether there exist standardized types of rhematic sequences as well” (cit. note 46,127).

4.3 Yet another revision will be needed to handle strategic manipulations in texts, whereby material which would be thematic by Czechoslovakian criteria (i.e. known, given, etc.) gets treated as rhematic and vice versa. Here, strategic discrepancies can be exploited between the actual sentence perspective and the expected one. Departures from expected word order can be doubly dynamic through contrasts both with the expected word order and with “known content” (cf. 3.27).

4.4 To illustrate the revisions I have sketched, we can consider this excerpt from a news item in the Malaysia Straits Times (March 20, 1990, numbering added):

(26.1) DPM: Pontian to become major tourist destination

(26.2) The coastal district of Pontian, about 60 km from Johor Baru, is to be developed into a major tourist destination, the Deputy Prime Minister said today.

(26.3a) He said the town had tremendous tourism potential (26.3b) and concerted efforts would be made to tap this resource.

(26.4) Among other things, a $1 million jetty would be constructed to facilitate arrivals from Singapore.

(26.5) Several new handicraft centres, recreational facilities, and food outlets would also be built.

(26.6) He said Pulau Pisang, a small island off Kukup, also had tremendous tourism potential and would be developed in due course.

(26.7) [...] “Little known attractions in the district could be developed into a major tourist attraction”, he said, adding that ambitious plans were already on the drawing board. [...]

(26.8) According to the plan, the sparsely populated fishing district washed by the waters of the Malacca Straits on one side and the Johor Straits on the other, could be turned into a major tourist attraction. [etc. etc.]

Like most text beginnings, the headline (26.1) presents new content which will subsequently be thematic, in this case the connection between the two concepts Pontian and major tourist destination, and assigns the content to the declaration of a government official (DPM). The entire statement is thus rhematic, although its constituents are so in differing degrees. For readers familiar with the region, the total content is high in CD, because the region was at the time just the opposite. I discovered it by accident; I found no mention of it in the travel guides, and the region was mostly a mud flat without a single hotel, just an old Government Rest House from the British Colonial Period, with usual bad plumbing. Here, the CD derives not so much from relations inside sentences as from the contrast between current state (mud flat) and planned state (five-star luxury mud flat) of the region .  

Pontian mud flat in 1989

The tiny whale-shaped bump on the horizon is  Pulau Pisang, uninhabited, the locals told me.

4.5 On the other hand, the proposal might not seem so high in CD after all. The proximity of Singapore 60 km away, a rich and horrendously crowded island whose citizens are probably (next to the Japanese) Asia’s most relentless tourists to get away from the stress, makes it predictable that Pontian and Pulau Pisang would soon be turned into Singaporean enclaves (already the fate of their counterparts on the other side of the Malaysian peninsula, Desaru and Pulau Tioman). In addition, 1990 had been officially declared the “Visit Malaysia Year”, so that tourism was generally thematic in public discourse and a top official would be expected to talk nineteen to the dozen about it. This tension between degrees of CD is probably rather commonplace: material can appear high in CD in the immediate perspective (Firbas’ “narrow scene” 3.33) but become thematic when its probability has been more thoroughly assessed.

4.6 For readers unfamiliar with the region, the story-writer has interspersed some strategic geographic content that becomes steadily more specific coastal district and 60 km from here (i.e., from Johor Baru, a large and well-known city) (26.2), and the sparsely populated fishing district washed by the waters of the Malacca Straits on one side and the Johar Straits on the other (26.8). For these readers, such content is high in CD and rhematic, because it would not have been activated in memory by the headline alone. Such was the case for the people on Pulau Pinang near the other end of Malaysia, where I was working when this article was printed. The content allowed them to locate the region accurately and to compare and contrast it with their own considerably more developed and, erm, Singaporized island. Their attitudes about the benefits or (more often) the drawbacks of being a major attraction lent the topic a special relevance and some sickly emotional impact as well.

4.7 Yet all this content is placed within the respective sentences in subject position, which is more typically thematic than rhematic (cf. 3.3). This positioning allows the readership the option of taking it as thematic, and the writer need not risk alienating them by telling them what they already know or should know. This tactic illustrates another important tension in FSP: accommodating the audience by giving them new information while suggesting through word order that they are actually already well-informed.

4.8 For foreign readers with no knowledge of Malaysia, CD would be uniformly high in terms of unfamiliarity but low in absence of the crucial contrast between proposed and current state of the region. The added geographic content could help them locate the region with the aid of a map, but they would have to make a special effort to appreciate the relevance or “newsworthiness” of the article. The story-writer doubtless hoped that his text would arouse some interest among prospective visitors to come when the region would be “attractive” (e.g. when they could get there by water from Singapore instead of by the narrow and winding overland road) or indeed to get there before ‘development’ and enjoy the tranquillity I remember so well. In such considerations, FSP can be seen as a set of communicative practices for balancing dynamism against relevance, i.e., for communicating new content while relating it to what the intended audience knows or should know and motivating them to alter their knowledge.

4.9 Like many newspaper articles, this one spreads a fairly small amount of new content across a fairly long text. The opening sentence (26.2) is a paraphrase of the headline with added geographical content. Hence, the thematic progression in Danes’ sense would apply to the entire sentence except for coastal district and about 60 km from here, and even these would seem thematic to local residents after the headline. The today in the very final slot (a good rhematic position) is merely the default time for reports in an evening newspaper.

4.10 The sentence in the second paragraph starts with thematic subjects he and the town (26.3a) immediately “given” from reading the previous sentence (if one conflates region and town), but is not Danes' “simple linear” type, because the predicate is quite low in CD, tremendous tourism potential being an obvious prerequisite for a major tourist destination. The conjoined clause (26.3b) has more dynamism in the subject slot (concerted efforts) than in the predicate (would be made to tap this resource) and would thus be rheme – theme, although the difference in CD hardly seems significant enough to count as “marked” or “emotive”. The subject of the next sentence (26.4) should be quite high in CD (a $1 million jetty), whereas the predicate should be predictable for readers familiar enough with the region to guess who will be arriving at the jetty. (the wealthy Chinese neo-mandarins from Singapore plus an ungodly stew of “Eurasians” -- that's from Singapore English for the rest of us -- looking for bargains or, erm, encounters). The difference here might suffice to make the rheme – theme order emphatic.

4.11 In (26.5), the three-part subject (several new handicraft centres. recreational facilities. and food outlets) is again higher in CD than the predicate (would also be built) but predictable for such attractions and thus hovers between Danes’' two types of “derived theme” and “split rheme”. In (26.6), the subject is a new location (Pulau Pisang, meaning ‘Banana Island’, by the way) known only by certain readers to be nearby, while the predicate includes a recurrence of a previous wording (tremendous tourism potential) and is therefore quite undynamic for all moderate sane readers. We thus have a thematic progression from (26.1) to (26.5) in which rheme – theme is much commoner than the reverse order for clauses, but the degrees of CD and the ratios between “given” and “new” are delicately nuanced.

4.12 The last two sentences I included (from later sections of the article) illustrate two further strategies. In (26.7), the content of attraction is slyly shifted: first something attractive but little known, then something actually attracting tourists and thus well-known. This content-shifting strategy papers over the contrast between the region's current state and the state foreseen by the ambitious plans, and substitutes a specious congruity to disguise the CD: the plans are merely developing an already present attraction. The implication could be that opposition to the plans among the inhabitants, who loathe Singaporeans as pompous, wealthy cheapskates, would be illogical or unreasonable.

4.13 The final sentence (26.8) gives a clearer illustration of the strategy already used in the opening sentence: elaborate prior content in an expanded subject and restate the proposal I for it in the predicate. The elaboration, deliberately I think, falls into the register of the travel guide or tourist advertisement and thus has the function of encouraging potential visitors more than informing the general public.

4.14 Throughout the news item, the ratio of clause and sentence positions deployed for thematic functions is conspicuously high. As soon as the thematic nodes of region/town and major tourist destination have been constituted and connected, very little of the subsequent content would function as strongly rhematic or high in CD. If communication were just a transaction for transporting facts (3.26) we might consider the text unmotivated. But insistent thematicity can be a strategic means for encouraging the audience to accept a particular conceptual configuration -- here, a current region and its future fate -- as logical or inevitable. After the headline has foregrounded this configuration, the subsequent text thematically backgrounds it through repetition, yet continues to steer focus by placing key expressions like attraction and develop in predicate slots, and by putting almost every sentence in a separate paragraph. The lack of new content is offset somewhat by gradually specifying the location and the incidental projects like jetty and handicraft centres, which are however introduced in subject position as if they might be thematic after all and therefore beyond question. Moreover, the location has special relevance (and communicative importance) in that the unlucky proximity to Singapore was undoubtedly the decisive consideration for the planners in the first place. Naturally, nobody advertised the unlucky fact that ‘pontianak’ means ‘vampire’ among the Malay, who put their graveyards at safe distances from the towns

4.15 In terms of Danes’ “thematic progressions”, the dominant ones are “continuous theme” and “split rheme”, though we cannot tell which of these two applies without a detailed estimate of the audience's prior knowledge. The repeated sentence order of rheme before theme seldom approaches the highly marked instances adduced in FSP work (emphatic, emotive, etc.). Indeed, thematic and rhematic shade over into each other, depending above all on how exact the reader's prior knowledge is assumed to be. The resulting nuances are strategic for the writer’s presumed dual purpose of making the plans seem eminently logical and of encouraging visitors to take note of something really newsworthy and relevant.

4.16 This brief discussion may illustrate the dialectic quality I have thematically attributed to functional approaches (1.22f; 2.10, 13, 21, 23, 29; 3.1, 15, 44). The multifunctional layering of utterances is an appropriation of systematic means which may be utilized in both expected and unexpected ways. The interaction between the available options and the speaker-writer's actual choices during text processing is complex but systematic. FSP has so far been more concerned with the options, in part because of the usual limitation to single illustrative sentences, yet has thereby provided a valuable means for estimating the significance and impact of the actual choices. Herein lies the most crucial heritage of FSP research for text linguistics.

4.17 My treatment of the sample text is, like many others in text linguistics provisional and incomplete; the next stage would be to probe the speaker-writer's real intentions and decisions (which I only reconstructed) and well as the audience's real reactions (which I only sampled in a cursory way). Despite the difficulties of such a stage, some empirical methods can be implemented. We can observe writers during such activities as thinking out loud while they write, revising a draft, or adjusting the same content for audiences with different background knowledge. We can observe audiences' reactions in terms of how well they assimilate new information, how inclined they are to accept the speaker-writer's perspective, and how their response shifts when a text has been dramatically altered in FSP and CD. The effects of schematic prior knowledge can be probed with such technique as testing for “priming”: the text is interrupted and the audience must react to a probe word, the reaction time being a linear correlate of the degree of activation at that precise moment.{94}

4.18 The picture we can anticipate for such further research will undoubtedly reveal substantially greater variation and complexity than FSP research has suggested so far. We cannot demand a strict framework that definitively identifies and labels every constituent of every sentence or that states exactly which positions and boundaries determine theme and rheme in every case. No sure-fire set of steps for the mechanical and binary division of sentences will emerge. Nor will the structuralist descriptive categories for linguistic “levels” and “units” be sufficient. Instead, functional interactions among levels or units will have to be prominently featured in the conceptualisation and statement of the categories.

4.19 Most of the complaints voiced in the past about FSP work signal an inappropriate conception of functionality itself, which always requires an active engagement with communicative materials. The results are more often expansive and plausible than constrictive and deterministic (cf. 1.5; 2.23, 30). It will understandably be difficult to implement new working procedures which embody the full implications of functionality and multifunctionality, but we can take an auspicious step by revising our demands and reconsidering which criticisms of past work are genuinely substantive.

4.20 In addition, it is more essential to determine one's interests and goals for functional research than for formal research. Originally, FSP was utilized as a dimension for describing and comparing whole languages and groups of languages, e.g. Weil 's pioneering volume of 1844 comparing “ancient languages” with 'modern” ones (cit. note 76, 36). Mathesius and Firbas utilized FSP to compare earlier and later stages of the same language, as well as to compare Czech and English. Much recent work has probed only the current state of a single language.

4.21 Yet functional research is eminently suitable for more tangible goals than general language description. Empirical work can probe the hypothesis that explicit and conscious deployment of the means for FSP can help make communication more efficient (i.e. less effortful) and effective (i.e. more likely to attain a goal). Robust findings would in turn offer a basis for giving more rational advice to writers and educators, who all too often have to rely on timeworn maxims and vague intuitions. At this point, FSP research becomes a prime contributor to the highest goal of text linguistics: to support the freedom of access to knowledge through discourse. Of course, skilful use of FSP can be (and often is) deployed as a means of manipulation and misinformation as well. As for all such means, the only reliable defence is a general and critical awareness of the tactics and criteria involved, e.g., for the devious injection of presuppositions (cf. 3.26).

4.22 It may be objected here that such a deployment of linguistic research has no consistent tradition, in contrast, say, to rhetoric. This lack, however, is largely a product of the formalist orientation depicted in section 1, which encourages theories and explanations on too high a level of abstraction to be suitable for the applications suggested here. An actively functionalist orientation allows for much greater applicability, even if this factor has not been highly conspicuous in the past.

4.23 FSP research is still at some distance from its own principles and implications. But it still ranks among the chief signposts for the directions that functional explorations of language should pursue, as well as one of the most thoughtful and consolidated bodies of reflections and demonstrations for the functionality and multifunctionality of linguistic categories, whether in the virtual system or in the actual utterance. The proceedings in FSP studies continually look to form, function, and meaning as mutually indispensable aspects of all language phenomena, and to the complex relations of these phenomena to such domains as reality, point of view, intention, knowledge, memory, emotion, stress, and so on.

4.24 Text linguistics too is at a crossroads. My New Introduction was not released until 2004, including retrospects and prospects and the outline of a programme for improving access to knowledge through discourse. As the work was slowing moving along, I felt it would be fitting indeed to salute the heritage of FSP and its pioneering achievements. 

NOTES 

{1) An earlier version of this paper was presented in lune 1990 at the Usta Pro Jazyk Cesky, Ceskoslovenska Academie Ved (Czech Language Institute at the Czechoslovakian Academy of Sciences), to whose members I am much indebted for a lively discussion. I was pleased with, the opportunity to survey Czechoslovakian functional linguistics, which limitations of space had forced me to exclude from my book Linguistic Theory: The Discourse of Fundamental Works (with Longmans' of London, 1991). Yet the scope of my survey here is limited in four main ways. (1) Chronologically, it focuses on research published between 1924 and 1974, the latter year marked by the appearance of two useful collections, edited by F. Danes, Papers in Functional Sentence Perspective (Prague) and by O. Dahl, Topic and Comment: Contextual Boundness and Focus (Hamburg). (2) Geographically, the focus is on Czechoslovakia, although similar research in other countries like the Soviet Union, Poland, and Austria was doubtless relevant. (3) Linguistically, since I am not fluent in Czech, I rely on papers in English, German, and French, and on occasional therein translated passages from the Czech. Volume I of TLP is cited under the original date 1964 rather than that of the 1966 reprinting, which coincided with Volume 2, (4) Not knowing how they might be defored on the Internet, the Czech orthography was simplified.

{2} F. de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, New York, 1966[1916], 232; TCLP 1, 1929, 7, cited from F. Danes, “On linguistic strata (levels)”, TLP 4,1971,127, m.t. (= my translation).

{3} Citations from V. Mathesius, “New currents and tendencies in linguistic research”, Mnema 1926, 198; and “Funkcni lingvistika”, Sbornik prednasek proslovenvch na prvnim sjezdu ceskostovenska profesoru filosofie. filotogie a historie v Prazne, 1929, 119.

{4} K.L. Pike, Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior, The Hague, 1967, 139, following L. Bloomfield, Language, Chicago, 1933, 175f.

{5} Sapir, Language, New York, 1921, 89.

{6} M.A.K. Halliday, An Introduction to Functional Linguistics, London, 1985, xx/xvii.

{7} Jakobson, “Beitrag zur algemeinen Kasuslehre”, TCLP 6,1936.

{8} Harris, “Distributional structure”, Word 10, 1954, 146-62.

{9} Harris, “Discourse analysis”, Language 28, 1952, 1-30/474-94.

{10} N. Chomsky, Svntactic Structures, The Hague, 1957, 43/100/104.

{11} See R. de Beaugrande, “Determinacy distribution in complex systems”, Zeitschrift für

Phonetik. Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung 40, 1987, 145-188.

{12} See Mathesius, “On some problems of the systematic analysis of grammar”, TCLP 6, 1936, 95-107; and Danes, cit. note 2.

{13} See R. de Beaugrande, “Complexity and linguistics in the evolution of three paradigms”, Theoretical Linguistics 17, 1991, 43-73; and Danes (cit. note 2, 130) contrasts “horizontal and qualitative complexity”, whose “degree” can be “measured simply by the number of sub-units (components)” against “vertical and qualitative complexity” “measured by the number of hierarchies to which the sub-groupings of the simple components belong”. Compare 2.12.

{14} The Prague School itself has often been designated “structuralist”, even by its own members, but in a very broad sense -- whence Firbas' remark to me that Jakobson was a co-founder of the functional approach next to Mathesius, although in key points Jakobson's work remains (in my view) firmly on the formalist side. For purposes of the present discussion, this broad sense will be disregarded in favour of the narrower sense applying to linguistic schools descending from Saussure and Bloomfield. On the heritage of structuralism in semiotics, literary theory, and related fields, compare my volume Critical Discourse (Norwood. N.l, 1988).

{15} Martinet, A Functional View of Language, Oxford, 1962, 59.

{16} For critiques, see K. Horalek, “A criticism of the number two”, Preprints of Papers for the Ninth Internationat Congress of Linguists, 1963, 46f (and my note 71); M. Dokulil, “K otazce morfologickych protikladu”, SaS 19, 1958, 81-103; and P. Sgall, “Zur Frage der Ebenen im Sprachsystem”, TLP 1, 1964, 95-106.

{17} Mathesius 1926, loc. cit. note 3.

{18} V. Skalicka,”The need for a linguistics of 'la parole”, RLB 1,1948,21-38; B. Trnka,

“On the linguistic sign and the multi-level organization of language”, TLP 1, 1964,39; M.A.K. Halliday, Explorations in the Function of Language, London, 1973, 67.

{19} F. Danes and l. Vachek, “Prague studies in structural grammar today”, TLP 1, 1964: 26; cf. Trnka, cit. note 18, 37. Vachek (in “Prague phonological studies today” TLF' 1, 1964, 11), attributes the view of language as a system of systems to V.V. Vinogradov and makes it a foundational principle in his own survey of The Linguistic School of Prague (Bloomington, 1966).

20} Halliday, “The place of functional sentence perspective in the system of linguistic description”, in Danes ed. 1974 (cit. note 1), 52/44.

{21} J. Firbas, “On the prosodic features of the Modern English finite verb as a means of functional sentence perspective”, BSE 7, 1968, 39.

{22} K. Horalek, “Les fonctions de la langue et de la parole”, TLP 1, 1964, 41. See also K. Bühler, “Kritsche Musterung der neuen Theorien des Satzes”, Indogermanisches Jahrbuch 6/26, 1918; “Das Strukturmodell der Sprache”, TCLP 3, 1936, 3-11; and Die Sprachthorie (Jena, 1943); and F. Kainz, Psychologie der Sprache, Stuttgart, 1940. Haliiday (cit. note 20,45) misunderstood Novak and Sgall (“On the Prague functional approach”, TLP 3, 1968, 292), who attributed “not to language but to utterance” only the “functions” of Bühler rather than all functions in general.

{23} Mathesius, “O tak zvanem aktualnim cleneni vetnem”, SaS 5, 1939, 171-174; compare his earlier “Zur Satzperspektive im modernen Englisch”, Archiv für das Studium der modernen Sprachen und Literaturen 84/155, 1929, 200-210. On the origin and evolution of Mathesius' terminology, see F. Danes, “Prispevek k novejsi syntakticke terminologii”, Slavjanska lingvisticna terminologija 1, 1962, 46-52.

{24} Danes, “A three-level approach to syntax”, TLP 1, 1964,229.

{25} Saussure, cit. note 3,124; E. Benveniste, “Les niveaux de l'analyse linguistique” Proceedings of the 9th International Congress of Linguists, The Hague, 1964, 271-275.

{26} Mathesius, “Rec a sloh”, Cteni o jazvce a poezii 6,1942, 188. Danes (cit. note 2, 139) attributes to Mathesius without citation the thesis that “the potentially infinite set of sentences” are “the phenomena of Ia paroIe”.

{27} Firbas, “Some aspects of the Czechoslovak approach to problems of functional sentence perspective”, in Danes ed. 1974 (cit. note 1),14.

{2B} Bloomfield, cit. note 4, 170.

{29} For Chomsky, “Topic – Comment”' wound be “the basic grammatical relation of surface structure corresponding (roughly) to the fundamental Subject –Predicate relation of deep structure” (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge Mass., 1965, 220f) (cf. 2.34). For discussion of this “inadequate note”, see P. Sgall, “Zur Stellung der Thema-Rhema-Gliederung in der Sprachbeschreibung”, in Danes ed. 1974 (cit. note 1), 54-75; P. Sgall, E. Hajicova, and E. Benesova, Topic, Focus, and Generative Semantics, Kronberg, 1973; and O. Dahl, Topic and Comment: A Study in Russian and General Transformational Grammar, Stockholm, 1969, and “Topic-comment structure revisited”, in Dahl ed. 1974 (cit. note 1), 1-24.

{30} l. Vachek and l. Firbas, Lingvisticka characteristika soucasne anglictiny, Prague, 1962; Firbas, “On defining the theme in functional sentence analysis”, TLP 1, 1964, 275; Sgall et al., c i t. note 29, 40.

{31} Firbas, “Notes on the function of the sentences in the act of communication”, SPFFBU, A10, 1962, 137.

{32} Sgall, cit. note 16, 96, after S. Karcevskij, “Du dualisme asymetrique du signe linguistique”, TCLP 1, 1929, 88ff.

{33} E. Benes, “On two aspects of function sentence perspective”, TLP 3,1971, cit. note 30, 275.

{34} M. Dokuli1 and F. Danes, “K tzy. vyznamove a mluvnicke stabe vety”, O vedeckem poznani soudobych jazvkyo, Prague, 1958, 23Bf; Benes, cit. note 33, 270.

{35} Firbas, “Non-thematic subjects in Contemporary English”, TLP 2, 1966,240.

{36} Firbas, “Some thoughts on the functon of word order in Old English and Modern English”, SPFFBU 6, 1957, 74.'

{37} Sgall et al., cit. note 29, 27f, ask whether “various utterance tokens corresponding to a sentence” can “differ in their TCA [topic-comment articulation]”, and “conclude that two tokens differing” in this way “correspond to two different sentence structures (derivations)”.

{3B} Mathesius, loc. cit. note 26. For commentary, see Firbas 1966, cit. note 35, 239; and Firbas, “From comparative word-order studies”, BSE 4, 1964, 113.

{39} Danes et. al. “Zur Terminologie der FSP”, in Danes ed. 1974, cit. note 1, 220) attribute the first use of “topic” and “comment” to Y.R. Chao (working with Chinese, see note 44) and cite Ch. Hockett, A Course in Modern Linguistics, New York, 1958, as an infIuentiaI source. One the few Iarge-scale American studies engaging with Czechslovakian FSP is L.K Jones, Theme in English Expository Discourse, Lake Bluff, IL, 1977.

{40} Danes et al., cit. note 39, 218, m.t., remark that “the Latin translation 'subjectum' and 'predicatum' restricted the applicability of the terms to the judgment [Urteil]”.

{41} Danes' well-known paper (cit. note 24, 225) uses these sentences as a jumping-off point. A typical echo of Danes' “striking reaction” can be found in G. Bos, “Ambiguity, the opposition active-passive, and Chomsky’s deep structure, TLP 3, 1971, 189, who likens it to “M. Dokulil’s ideas expressed in his article “Zum wechselseitigen Verhältnis zwischen Wortbildung und Syntax”, TLP 1, 1964, 215-224.

{42} According to Danes et al., cit. note 39, 220, “some Soviet scholars (A.S. Mel’nicuk, P.Z. Panfilof) reintroduced the terms 'logical subject' and 'logical predicate' in the belief that these reflect the logical categories in language”. Also cited is Ph. Wegener's notion (Untersuchungen über die Grundlagen des Sprachlebens, Halle, 1885) of “the acting subject” (“das handelnde Subjekt”) (op.cit., 218).

{43} J. Zubaty, “Die Wortfolge in den slavischen Sprachen”, Listy filologicke 28, 1901, 129-34; V. Ertl, “O posanveni podmetu po clenech uvoidnich”, Nase rec 1, 1917,33-38; F. Travnicek, “Zaklady ceskoslovenskeho slovosledu”, SaS 1, 1927,78-86. According to Danes et al., cit. note 39, 217, m.t., Gabelenz “introduced the terms” and Paul “defended and precisely expounded them”.

{44} Chinese and Japanese are also languages whose syntax must be handled with a functional approach, whence the key role of work by Y.R. Chao (note 39) and S. Kuno in the largely non-functional scene of American linguistics, particularly Kuno’s paper “Functional sentence perspective”, Linguistic Inquiry 3, 1972, 269-320.

{45} D. Bolinger, “Linear modification”, PMLA, 1952, 1117-1144. Firbas' early seminal paper of 1957 (cit. note 36, 73ff) saluted this “very valuable and highly suggestive contribution to the theory of FSP”.

{46} F. Travnicek, “O tak zvanem aktualnim cleneni vetnem”, SaS 22, 1962, 163-171; Boost, Neue Untersuchung zum Wesen und Struktur der Sprache, Berlin, 1955; Halliday, cit. notes 6 and 20; Firbas, cit. notes 27 and 30; Benes, cit. note 33; Danes, “Functional sentence perspective and the organization of the text”, in Danes ed. 1974, cit. note 1, 107-128; J. Erben, Abriss der deutschen Grammatik, Berlin, 1961; and Sgall et al., cit. note 29. Danes (op. cit., 108f) points out the untenability of Halliday's (cit. note 20,53, my emphasis) overstatement that “theme” “has nothing to do with previous mention”.

{47} Halliday, “Notes on transitivity and theme in English”, Journal of Linguistics 3-4, 1967-1968, 212.

{48} Compare L. Uhlirova, Kvantitativni rozbor vety a yvpovedi v cestine, Prague, 1970; and “On the role of statistics in FSP”, in Danes ed. 1974, (cit. note 1), 208-216.

{49} Firbas, “On the concept of communicative dynamism in the theory of functional sentence perspective”, SPFFBU A 19, 1971, 135f; Firbas, cit. note 36,72, note 30, 270, and note 35, 240.

{50} Sgall et al., cit. note 29, 18; Firbas, cit. note 36,72.

{51} Firbas, cit. note 36, 72, and note 35, 240.

{52} Sgall, “Focus and contextual boundness”, in Dahl ed. 1974, cit. note 1, 31f; Sgall et al., cit. note 29, 51f; Sgall, cit. note 29, 54; so “elements with a lower degree of CD than the verb always belong to the bound segment” (56).

{53} Firbas, cit. note 43, 74; cf. Firbas, cit. note 30, 270.

{54} Sgall, cit. note 29, 27; Sgall et al., cit. note 329, 45/286, with citation of “Firbas using it among his basic notions” (in “A note on transition proper in functional sentence analysis”, Philologia Pragiensa 8, 1965, 171), but the cited passage indicates it’s virtually the same as CD.

{55} Sgall et a1., cit. note 29, 46, following V. Smilauer, Novoceska skladba, Prague, 1966, 254; Firbas, cit. note 35, 240, and note 27, 19; Firbas, cit. note 38, 114. Firbas' suggestion that “the degree of communicative value of the verb depends on the total amount of functions the verb can perform in a sentence” at that “moment of communication” (“More thoughts on the communicative function of the verb in English verb, SPFFBU 7, 1959,74) resembles valence theory but is applied to actual, not virtual.

{56} For the treatment of these sentences, see Firbas, cit. note 30, 268-273/278, arguing against Travnicek (cit. note 57); Benes, cit. note 33,268; Sgall et al., cit. note 29, 19/29f; and Firbas, cit. note 35, 271.

{57} A. Svoboda, “On two communicative dynamisms”, in Danes ed. 1974, cit. note 1, 38-42; Firbas, cit. note 35, 137.

{58} Danes (cit. note 46, 113) “deduces” “two functions of the theme”: a “perspective” one with a “hierarchical” and “static point of view”, versus a “prospective” one with a “developmental” and “dynamic” point of view.

{59} Sgall, cit. note 29,39; Sgall et al., cit. note 29, 159.

{60} See T.A. van Dijk and W. Kintsch, Strategies of Discourse Comprehension, New York, 1983; surveys in R. de Beaugrande, Text. Discourse. and Process and Text Production, Norwood, N.J., 1984. On the role of memory, see, and E. Loftus, Memory, Reading, Mass., 1980.

{61} Sgall, cit. note 29,26; Sgall et al., cit. note 29,10.

{62} A. Collins and E. Loftus, “A spreading activation theory of semantic processing”, Psychological Review 82, 1975, 407-428.

{63} Compare the appeals to “known and unknown” in regard to “degrees of CD” and “On contextual dependence” in Firbas, cit. note 30, 272/276, and note 35, 36.

{64} Halliday urgently needed “given” and “new” after he tied “theme and rheme” firmly to serial positions (cf. 3.3). “Old and “new” are used by Kuno, cit. note 44.

{65} Chomsky, “Deep structure, surface structure, and semantic representation”, in Studies on Semantics in Generative grammar, The Hague, 1972 [1968]. See E. Hajicova, “Some remarks an presuppositions”, PBML 17, 1972, 11-23. I follow the presentation in Sgall et al., cit. note 29.

{66} The “surface structure” view of Chomsky was questioned for instance by Dahl 1969 (cit. note 29); G. Lakoff, “On generative semantics”, in D.D. Steinberg and L. Jakobovits. eds., Semantics, Cambridge UK, 1971, 151-271, and of course by Sgall et al.

{67} See R. Posner, “Types of dialogue: The functions of commenting”, Discourse Processing 3, 1980, 381-398.

{68) For details, see Beaugrande 1980, cit. note 60.

{69} See Beaugrande, cit. note 11, and “Semantics and text meaning: Retrospects and prospects”, Journal of Semantics 5, 1988, 89-121.

{70} Compare B. Ilyish, Sovremennyj anglijskij yazyk, Moscow, 1948,363, with his Structure of Modern English, Moscow, 1965, 201; Firbas, cit. note 41,241, 254f. The simple sentences below except (14) are cited from Firbas’ paper, pp. 243 and 252.

{71} Hjelmslev sorts his “functives” (i.e. the “terminals of a function”) into “constant” when its “presence is a necessary condition for the presence” of its other terminal, versus “variable” when its “presence is not necessary” (Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, Madison, Wis., 1969 [1943], 33/35/38). Sporadic uses in FSP include Danes (cit. note 25, 235) term “constant” for “constitutive features of a linguistic unit” which are “operative and relevant”, yet which “enter no opposition” (cf. critique of binariness, note 16); and Travnicek's unrealistic demand (quoted in Firbas, cit. note 32, 268) that “the essential feature of the theme” must be “invariably the same in all cases”.

{72} Mathesius, “Zakladni funkce proadku slov v cestine”, SaS 7, 1941, 175; and “Ze sronvavacich studii slovoslednych”, CMF 28, 1942, 302; translation cited from Firbas, cit. note 38, 117f, and Sgall et al., cit. note 29, 16.

{73} J. Mukarovksy, Kapitoly z ceske Poetiky, Prague 1941-48.

{74} Danes, cit. note 46, 108; Halliday, cit. note 47, 17. Danes attributes a similar view to Mathesius, 1939, cit. note 23.

{75} Op. cit., 118f. Firbas’ remarks suggest yet another possible pairing, namely “archaic” and “non-archaic”, but this dimension would be hard to distinguish from precious or flowery style, poeticisms, stock phrases, and so on.

{76} H. Weil, De l'ordre des mots dans les langues anciennes comparées aux langues modernes: Question de grammaire générale, Paris, 1844, 43/49; quoted from Fibas, cit. note 27, 12.

{77} C. Izard, Carroll, Human Emotions, New York, 1977; R. Fielher, Kommunikation und Emotion, Berlin/New York, 1990.

{78} K. Hausenblas, “Kratka uhava ma tema”, CL 17, 1969 3-10, translation from Danes, cit. note 46, li2.

{79} See S. Keele, Attention and Human Performance, Pacific Palisades, Cal., 1973; R. Shiffrin and W. Schneider, “Controlled and automatic human information processing”, Psychological Review 84, 1-66 and 127-190.

{80} M. Just and P. Carpenter, “A theory of reading: From eye fixations to comprehension”, Psychological Review 1980, 87, 329-354.

81} F. Danes, Intonace a veta ve spisovne cestine, Prague, 1957; D. Bolinger, Forms of English: Accent, Morpheme, Order, Tokyo, 1965; M.A.K. Halliday, Intonation and Grammar in British English, The Hague, 1967; and Firbas, cit. note 21.

{82} Firbas, cit. note 21, 41, following a source by A.G. Gimson which does not appear in his Bibliography; the term is of course not to be confused with Sgall et al.’s (cit. note 29, 48) “sentence nucleus” as “the verb and the elements depending on it”, i.e. “participants”, “cases”, and “free adverbials”.

{83} Compare Firbas (cit. note 21, 11): “morphemic and even submorphemic elements” are “capable of carrying degrees of CD”.

{84} Following J. AlIwood, “Truth, appropriateness, and focus”, in Dahl ed. 1974 (cit. note 1), 53-64.

{85} Bolinger, cit. note 45, 1123; Firbas, cit. note 36, 74f; Sgall et al., cit. note 29, 21.

{86} Firbas, cit. note 36, 75; Firbas, cit. note 21, 17; Sgall et al., cit. note 29, 45.

{87} Firbas, cit. note 21, 17. But elsewhere he suggests that “semantic structure ceases to operate” in “second instance sentences” (cit. note 53, 241).

{88} Going against Mathesius' precepts (cited in 1.21), Firbas “chooses the viewpoint of the hearer” for whom “the 'information is intended” (cit. note 30, 269, and note 27, 31).

{89} Danes, cit. note 27, 114, and “Zur linguistischen Analyse der Textstruktur”, Folia Linguistica 4, 1970, 73; Sgall, cit. note 29, 29. Sgall et al. (cit. note 29, 48f) cite Chomsky's suggestion to “establish the range of focus” “by relating the given sentence to a subsequent context”, viz. to a “natural response”. Compare also A. Hatcher, “Syntax and the sentence”, Word 12,1956,234-59; and Uhlirova, cit. note 48.

{90} Cit. note 89, 74, where he likens the operation to “a transformation with a high retention of grammatical and semantic structures”.

{91} P.Novak, “On the three-level approach to syntax”, TLP 2,1966,219.

{92} J.S. Petofi, “Modalität und topic-comment in einer logisch fundierten Textgrammatik”, in Dahl ed. 1974 (cit. note 1), 96, m.t.

{93} K. Pala, “O nekotrych problemach aktualnogo clenenia”, PSML 1, 1966, 81-92; B. Ulvestad, A Structural Approach to the Description of German Word Order, Bergen, 1960.

{94} See W. Kintsch, “The role of knowledge in discourse comprehension: A construction-integration model”, Psvchological Review 95/2, 1988, 163-182; “The representation of knowledge and the use of knowledge in discourse comprehension”, in R. Dietrich and C. Graumann (eds.), Language Processing in Social Context, Amsterdam, 1989, 185-209; and W. Kintsch and E. Mross, “Context effects in word identification”, Journal of Memory and Language 24, 1985, 336-349.

ABBREVIATIONS

BSE: Brno Studies in English

CMF :Casopis pro moderni filologii

PBML: Prague Bulletin in Mathematical Linguistics

PKLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association

RLB: Receuil linguistique de Bratislava

SaS: Slovo a Slovesnost

SPFFBU: Sbornik praci filosoficke fakulty brnenske University

TCLP: Travaux du Cercle Linguistiaue de Prague

TLP: Travaux Linguistiques de Prague