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<Paper uid="T75-1004">
  <Title>YNTACTIC PROCESSING AND ~UNCTIONAL SENTENCE PERSPECTIVE</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
4. FUNCTIONAL SENTENCE PERSPECTIVE
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The most satisfying solution to these problems is to be found in the work of the Prague school of linguists, particularly Mathesius, Firbas, Danes, and Sgall. The basic notion is that of the Functional Sentence Perspective according to which topic and focus are two regions in the scale of communicative dynamism along which each of the major constituents of a sentence are ordered. In the unmarked case, each succeding constituent in the surface string has a higher degree of communicative dynamism. The point on the scale at which one passes from topic to focus may or may not be marked. In speech, special stress can be used to mark any element as the focus; in writing, several devices like clefting fill the same role.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Communicative dynamism correlates with a number of other notions that are more familiar in this part of the world.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> glements that are low on this scale are the ones that are more contextually bound, which is to say that they involve presuppositions about the preceding text. In &amp;quot;It was Brutus that killed Caesar&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;that killed Caesar&amp;quot; is the topic and it clearly involves the presupposition that someone killed Caesar.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> in an unmarked sentence, like &amp;quot;Brutus killed Caesar&amp;quot;, it is not clear whether the dividing line between topic and comment ~alls before or after the verb; there are nevertheless three degrees of communicative dynamism involved.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> According to this .iew, the difference between &amp;quot;He gave Fido to Mary&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;He gave Mary Fido&amp;quot; is not in what is topic and what is focus but simply in the positions that &amp;quot;Mary&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Fido&amp;quot; occupy on the scale of communicative dynamism. Consider the sentences:  (I) John did all the work, but they gave the reward to Bill.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> (2) John did all the work, but they gave Bill the reward.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> (3) They were so impressed with the work that they gave Bill a reward.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> (4) They were so impressed with the work that they gave a reward to Bill.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> I claim that (2) and (4) are less natural than (I) and (3) when read with even intonation. Sentence (5), with underlining for stress, is, of course, quite natural, and (6) is questionable.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="9"> (5) John did all the work, but they gave Bill the reward.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="10"> (6) They were so impressed with the work  that they gave a reward to Bill.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="11"> The claim is simply that the last item carries the greatest communicative load, represents the most novel component of the sentence.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="12"> This is consistent with the observation that dative movement is at best awkward when the direct object is a pronoun, as in (7) I gave him it.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="13"> and it becomes more awkward when the indirect object is more ponderous, as in (8) I gave the man you said you had seen it.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="14"> In fact, it is consistent with the observation that ponderous constituents tend to be deferred, using such devices as extrapositlon. It is in the nature of pronouns that they are contextually bound, and the complexity of large constituents presumably comes directly from the fact that they tend to convey new information.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="15"> What this suggests is a formalism in which the structure of a phrase is a list of attributes named for grammatical functions, whose values are words or other phrases. They are ordered so as to show there positions on the scale of communicative dynamism and there is provision for a marker to be introduced into the list explicitly separating the topic from the focus.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="16"> Considering only the sentence level, and simplifying greatly, this would give examples like the following, using &amp;quot;/&amp;quot;as  The implications for reversible syntactic processing seem to be as follows: The familiar set of registers, named for the most part for the names of grammatical functions, are supplemented by three others called topic, focus and, say, marker.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="17"> Marker will have a value only when the sentence is marked in the sense I have been using. Topic and focus will contain ordered lists of elements. The structure of a passive sentence, for example, will be recognizable by the fact that it is unmarked and has a patient (dative, or whatever) as the first item on its topic list. The parser will place the first noun phrase in a &amp;quot;standard&amp;quot; sentence on this list and only copy it into some other register later. The generator will ~ unload the first item into the string and decide later what form of verb to produce.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="18"> The ill-formedness of the ideas I have tried to present here is clear for all to see. I have so far acquired only the most tenuous grasp of what the Czech linguists are doing and, while I should publicly thank Petr Sgall for his patience in explaining it to me, it is only right that I should also appologise for the egregious errors I have doubtless been guilty of. But, whatever errors of detail there may be, one important point will, I hope, remain. The notions of topic and focus are clearly well motivated in theoretical linguistics, and the richer notion of functional sentence perspective probably is also. I have been led to these same notions for purely technical reasons arising out of my desire to build a reversible syntactic processor.</Paragraph>
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