Topic-Focus Articulation and degrees of salience in the Prague Dependency Treebank

In Czech linguistics, TFA has been systematically explored thanks to the classical Prague School of functional and structural linguistics. As reflecting the ‘given – new’ strategy in discourse, TFA has been considered to belong to the main objects of linguistic study. Continuing the results gained by V. Mathesius, J. Firbas and others since the 1920s, the explicit linguistic descriptive framework characterized in Sgall et al. (1986), Hajičová (1993), Hajičová E., Partee B. and P. Sgall (1998) includes a possibility to describe TFA not only as concerning the intrinsic dynamics of the process of communication, patterned in the utterance (sentence occurrence), but also as constituting the structure of the sentence itself, i.e. grammar. Within this framework, TFA is understood as one of the basic aspects of (underlying) sentence structure, which characterizes the sentence as a unit of the interactive system of language; TFA thus is seen as a manifestation of the sentence being anchored in the context.