@article{oai:soar-ir.repo.nii.ac.jp:00017665, author = {宮井, 捷二}, journal = {信州大学教養部紀要. 第一部, 人文科学}, month = {Feb}, note = {The main purpose of this paper is to review some of the notions of Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) or related approaches that have been proposed by Vilem Mathesius, Jan Firbas, M. A. K. Halliday, Wallace L. Chafe and several other linguists, and to investigate the application of FSP to the description of English and Japanese. The history of FSP and related notions is studied from within the European grammatical tradition. Among linguists of the Prague School who have been concerned with FSP, Firbas regards FSP as the arrangement of sentence elements as it is viewed in the light of the context, both verbal and situational. Those sentence elements which convey something that is known, or may be inferred, from the context are regarded as the communicative basis, as the theme of the sentence. On the other hand, those sentence elements which convey new information are regarded as the communicative nucleus, as the rheme of the sentence. Basically, sentence elements are arranged according to the principle 'from the known to the unknown.' One of Firbas's basic concepts is that of communicative dynamism (CD) which is also discussed in this paper. In the framework of systemic linguistics, the structure of the English clause is the outcome of the interplay of syntactic options in the three main areas of transitivity, mood and theme which are based upon three basic functions of language: experiential, interpersonal and textual functions. This distinction of levels of analysis should be adopted in the description of any other natural language. FSP or the theme-rheme structure approach belongs to the area of theme. In the following example: // John made me ANGRY //, which is declarative, unmarked in focus and unmarked in theme, actor = subject = given = theme. Among a few American linguists who are concerned with FSP, Chafe approaches linguistic problems from the psychological aspect of language. He proposes an interdisciplinary area labeled 'psychosemantics'. Following Halliday, Chafe adopts the linguistic distinction between given and new information. Given information is that which the speaker assumes to be already present in the addressee's consciousness at the time of an utterance. In his recent mimeographed paper, he discusses the 'packaging' phenomena relevant to the status of noun as in the following: (1) the noun may be either given or new; (2) it may be a focus of contrast; (3) it may be definite or indefinite; (4) it may be the subject of its sentence; (5) it may be the topic of its sentence; and (6) it may represent the individual whose point of view the speaker is taking or with whom the speaker empathizes. For the description of the English and Japanese examples, in addition to the above basic concepts, some of which are more or less established in linguistics, the following are also particularly important and useful in the theory of FSP: interrelationships of FSP and phonological features of the sentence; Halliday's information focus, information unit and marked theme; Susumu Kuno's elaborated distinction of functions of Japanese particles wa and ga; presupposition; etc. The analysis of a Japanese text in terms of theme-rheme structure, in comparison with its English translation, shows differences of structure between English and Japanese texts. As already indicated by several linguists, pronominalization in Japanese is very incomplete compared with that in English or other European languages which is, so to speak, perfect. The frequency in so-called 'fragmentary sentences' in spoken Japanese is much greater than in spoken English. They can be explained as sentences composed of rhemes only, as shown in the following diagram., Article, 信州大学教養部紀要. 第一部, 人文科学 11: 155-169(1977)}, pages = {155--169}, title = {FUNCTIONAL SENTENCE PERSPECTIVE (FSP) の英語および日本語の記述への応用の試み}, volume = {11}, year = {1977} }