Katerina Velká

Fsp of English Existential Sentences Katerina Velká

The book deals with the Functional sentence perspective of English existential sentences. In the theoretical part of the paper, the reader is acquainted with essential information concerning syntactic, semantic and functional description of English existential sentences. Chapter 3 offers information about syntactic structure of existential there-constructions and its relationship with regular SVO sentence structure. In the following chapter, semantic variation among existential sentences is discussed. In Chapter, Firbasian theory of FSP is introduced, focusing especially on communicative dynamism and degrees of communicative dynamism distributed by different sentence elements. Dynamic semantic functions, dynamic semantic scales, and factors influencing the distribution of FSP are introduced as well. The analytical part is based on analysis of a corpus of 250 English existential sentences that were subjected to a functional description. Sentences are grouped in accord with what dynamic semantic scale they represent. Three groups of scales are descriptively analysed. Afterwards, conclusions defining general patterns and tendencies of the FSP of English existential sentence are drawn.