Syntactic and FSP Aspects of Fronting as a Style Marker

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