Publication details
The internal structure, communicative value and prosodic weight of the English object
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 1985 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Brno Studies in English 16 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Linguistics |
| Keywords | object; internal structure; communicative and prosodic importance |
| Description | The paper is a study of the communicative importance of the object in an English sentence. It analyzes objects in scripted spoken text from the viewpoint of functional sentence perspective (FSP) and intonation. The degree of communicative dynamism and the degree of prosodic weight carried by an object is related to the object's internal structure (i.e. the complexity of the noun phrase functioning as object). Complex objects tend to carry higher degrees of communicative dynamism and prosodic weight than simple objects. However, under certain conditions even very simple objects (e.g. pronominal objects) become heavily accentuated and perform the function of the rheme proper of the sentence. |