Functional Sentence Perspective and the Organization of the Text

I velopment of the communication" (1964, 270) and at the same time he states thai T is constituted "by the sentence elementes) carrying the lowest degree(s) of CD within the sentence" (ibid., 272). T "need not necessarily convey known information or such as can be gathered from the verbal and situational context" (ibid.). This third aspect of FSP may be viewed as a refined analysis of aspect (2). (In fact, the different degrees of the thematic and rhematic character of sentence elements were mentioned even by Mathesius.) Instead of a strict bipartition of the "information-bearing structure" of the sentence (to use P. Garvin's rendition of Mathesius's Czech term "aktualni cleneni") we arrive at an uneven distribution of CD over the sentence, assigning various degrees of thematicity, or rhematicity to different sentence elements. The two basic aspects of FSP, i.e., the contextual and the thematic Olles, have beeil pointed out by other linguists as weIl, e.g. E. BENES(1959, 1968), M. A. K. HALLIDAY(1967), P. SGALL(1969), F. DANES(1964, 1970). Most distinctly and consequently ibis distinction hag beeil pursued by HaIliday: in the broad area of "Theme" he distinguishes two simuItaneous structures of text: (1) "information focus" (given new), and (2) "thematization" (T R). The former determines the organization of text into discourse units, the latter frames each c1ause into the form of a message about Olle of its constituents.1 It should be noted, however, thai the said distinction is an incomplete dichotomy: the differentiation concerns the first members 9l t~~.!~~_I)_::irs onl{'_(i:~~.?_!h~!<_!l°:Y...~_.cgivenlp.iec~"ofj}l!ormatjon vs. theme), while the second members'!:;n~jde!ltiQfl..Lyjz 1ll(:~LQ.ore ~._. of the utterance or the rheme (what the speaker gays about the ~ ~ ~ " FUNCTIONAL SENTENCE PERSPECTIVE AND THE ORGANIZATION OF THE TEXT