Rhematic subjects in written English: regular preverbal position vs. focusing by it-cleft

The thesis aims to describe and compare the use of two English syntactic structures: sentences with a rhematic subject in the preverbal position and it-clefts with focused subject. It does so from the viewpoint of functional sentence perspective as conceived and elaborated by the members of the Prague Linguistic School and their Brno School followers. The main goal of the thesis is to determine whether the constructions are mutually exclusive or whether they can be under certain circumstances interchangeable. For the purposes of the analysis, 200 example sentences were collected from contemporary fiction, i.e. 100 for each construction. Subsequently, their relevant features were examined, especially those concerning dynamic semantic scales and realization form of the subjects; these aspects were expected to differ. The analysis has shown that each of the constructions has rather specific uses and they overlap only rarely, in sentences in which the two basic dynamic semantic scales, the Presentation Scale and the Quality Scale, intersect