Abstract
After a systematic empirical investigation of the questions of topic and focus (comment), or theme and rheme, our research team has come to certain conclusions (see Sgall, Hajicova and Benesova, 1973; Sgall and Hajicova, 1977), which include several rather strong hypotheses. Though, of course, they do not cover the whole domain of word order, intonation and their functions, they appear to present a useful basis for a detailed description of the main features of the domain (leaving aside, for the time being, such specific cases as some kinds of contrast, sentences with more than one intonation centre, some non-projective constructions, etc.)
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Sgall, P. (1983). Relevance of Topic and Focus for Automatic Question Answering. In: Kiefer, F. (eds) Questions and Answers. Linguistic Calculation, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-7016-8_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-7016-8_11
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