Some notes on the interface of communicative dynamism and prosodic prominence as constituents of auctorial communicative strategy

Martin Adam

Some notes on the interface of communicative dynamism and prosodic prominence as constituents of auctorial communicative strategy

Vol.3,No.2(2010)

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With a few honourable exceptions (most recently Chamonikolasová 2007, 2009 and Headlandová Kalischová 2009, 2010), within the research in the ﬁ eld of the Firbasian theory of functional sentence perspective (FSP), the interplay of factors operating in spoken discourse seems to play a somewhat marginal role. It is its written counterpart that wins the scholars’ attention most of the time. The present paper deals with a functional comparison of the distribution of the degrees of communicative dynamism (CD) and that of the degrees of prosodic prominence (PP) in spoken discourse, their interplay, and its possible (aesthetic) effects. Drawing above all on the ﬁ ndings presented by Firbas, the author discusses the results of his own investigation into the area of FSP based on an authentic short text sample. Research has shown (Firbas 1995, Svoboda 2006, Adam 2009, Hurtová 2009) that the author’s communicative purpose is typically related to the aesthetic function carried by the text and determines the communicative strategies employed.

Keywords:
FSP; communicative dynamism; prosodic prominence; communicative strategy; aesthetic function

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