AUC PHILOLOGICA
AUC PHILOLOGICA

AUC Philologica (Acta Universitatis Carolinae Philologica) is an academic journal published by Charles University. It publishes scholarly articles in a large number of disciplines (English, German, Greek and Latin, Oriental, Romance and Slavonic studies, as well as in phonetics and translation studies), both on linguistic and on literary and cultural topics. Apart from articles it publishes reviews of new academic books or special issues of academic journals.

The journal is indexed in CEEOL, DOAJ, EBSCO, and ERIH PLUS.

AUC PHILOLOGICA, Vol 2017 No 1 (2017), 63–89

Syntactic and FSP Aspects of Fronting as a Style Marker

Libuše Dušková

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/24646830.2017.5
published online: 20. 07. 2017

abstract

The paper examines contextual and emphatic fronting in academic prose, fiction narrative and fiction dialogue in order to ascertain whether the types of fronting can serve as a style marker. The differences in the distribution and their effect on style are assumed to be connected with the respective FSP structures: in emphatic fronting the fronted element is the rheme, whereas in contextual fronting it is the diatheme. Hence emphatic fronting displays a prominent deviation from the basic distribution of communicative dynamism, whereas contextual fronting achieves agreement with it. As compared with the unmarked postverbal ordering, emphatic fronting intensifies the emphatic/emotional character of the content being expressed, which is a feature of speech, while contextual fronting serves as a direct link with what precedes, hence contributes to textual cohesion, which is a characteristic of academic prose, with fiction narrative presumably occupying an intermediate position. The results of the study show more types of fronting with diversified structures and less clear-cut relations between the types of frontings and the examined text sorts.

keywords: style marker; contextual fronting; emphatic fronting; functional sentence perspective; academic prose; fiction narrative; fiction dialogue

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Syntactic and FSP Aspects of Fronting as a Style Marker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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ISSN: 0567-8269
E-ISSN: 2464-6830

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