Functional sentence perspective in Inga

results. 'Word-order phenomena constitute a system.' This was the view expressed by Vilem Mathesius (I882-1945), founder of the Linguistic Circle of Prague (as quoted by his disciple Jan Firbas (I964: iii)), who, in an effort to establish such a system, analysed the sentence into its 'functional' elements. From his work emerged the theory of 'Functional Sentence Perspective' (usually abbreviated to FSP), and it is on the principles developed by Firbas, as he applied the study of FSP to English (cf. Firbas, I971, for a detailed summary of his views and a fairly comprehensive bibliography) that this study is based. It is the thesis of this paper that the order of elements and the position of certain enclitics in the Inga sentence are basically accounted for by the principles of FSP. However, partial redefinitions of the principal units, falling within the spirit, if not the letter, of Firbas' definitions, are necessary to account for phenomena found when known elements are refocussed upon (?543). This paper also proposes the establishment of 'indexed' elements in Inga, which indicate significant connections between sentences, as an additional factor needed to account completely for the arrangement of elements in the sentence (?4).