The Information Structure of English and Czech

Doc. PhDr. Jana Chamonikolasová, Ph.D.

The Information Structure of English and Czech

Abstract: In the process of communication, speakers/writers convey messages containing ideas arranged in a particular way. The arrangement of ideas – the information structure of discourse – reflects the properties of the communication language as well as the circumstances under which the ideas are presented. The talk will present a brief survey of the theories of information structure working with the concepts of given/new information, topic/focus, and theme/rheme. It will focus on the Brno theory of Functional Sentence Perspective and its application in a comparative analysis of English and Czech written and spoken texts. It will identify and illustrate the main information structure differences between the two languages.