Personal pronouns, functional sentence perspective and intonation
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 1989 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Brno Studies in English 18 |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Linguistics |
| Keywords | personal pronouns; functional sentence perspective; intonation |
| Description | The paper is a study of personal pronouns from the viewpoint of functional sentence perspective and intonation. It indicates that the communicative dynamism of personal pronouns is comparatively low. It is slightly higher with the objective forms than with the subjective forms. In accordance with their low degree of communicative dynamism, the majority of personal pronouns are unstressed; few bear unaccented stress, head stress, or a nuclear stress that does not represent the intonation centre of the sentence. A minority of personal pronouns come to convey the rheme proper and to bear the intonation centre of the sentence. They do so mainly owing to emotive re-evaluation or contextual disengagement in cases of contrast. The comparison of English sentences with their Czech equivalents suggests that there are considerable differences between English and Czech in the means of expressing emotiveness. |