Publication details
Attributive relative clauses in the hierarchy of communicative units and distributional fields within the theory of FSP
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Description | There is, to a certain degree, a disagreement among FSP scholars as to the status of attributive relative clauses in the hierarchy of communicative units and distributional fields. Some, notably Jan Firbas (1992: 17–19), treat relative clauses as integral parts of their “parent” noun phrases. Grammatically, semantically, and functionally, i.e. with respect to the distribution of degrees of CD (communicative dynamism), they are regarded as distributional fields of the second rank and their individual constituents as communicative units of the second rank. They thus affect the basic distribution of degrees of CD only indirectly, through modifying the head noun of the noun phrase. On the other hand, in Svoboda’s approach (1968: 82–87; 1987: 75–85) relative clauses have a more direct effect on the basic distributional field, since functionally their components are regarded as communicative units of the first rank, and the two distributional fields, i.e. the main and the relative clause, both as distributional fields of the first rank, intertwined within one single structure. The aim of the present contribution is to consider both approaches and test them against the data in a manually collected corpus of sentences containing relative clauses. The ultimate goal is to propose applications and slight modifications with respect to specific functional, syntactic, semantic, and grammatical circumstances. |
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