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- Title
FOCUS AND THE QUESTION TEST.
- Authors
Sgall, Petr
- Abstract
This article presents an analysis of many English sentences of different structures that have corroborated the view that the hierarchy of communicative dynamism of the participants of a verb can be accounted for by their left-to-right ordering. This can be tested in an operational way by means of the questions the sentence may answer. There are several difficulties concerning the applicability of this test to the verb. There are also problems in cases where the first verbal participant belongs to the topic and after the verb there follows some other participant that can be also understood as belonging to the topic. For a sentence with no such ambiguity, the sets of appropriate questions fulfill certain conditions. The questions used in the test must represent all relevant items of the situation of the discourse.
- Subjects
ENGLISH grammar; VERBS; WORD order (Grammar); DISCOURSE analysis; ENGLISH language sentences; VERBALS (Grammar)
- Publication
Folia Linguistica, 1975, Vol 7, Issue 3/4, p301
- ISSN
0165-4004
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1515/flin.1975.7.3-4.301