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Jan Firbas was born on the 25 March 1921 in Brno. He was a Czech linguist and a prominent representative of the Prague School of linguistics. As a professor of the English language at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University, a highly esteemed follower of the linguistic tradition established by the Prague School and one of the most prominent representatives of twentieth-century linguistics. He studied English, German and philosophy.

Jan Firbas spent most of his life in the city of Brno where he was born on 25 March 1921. After finishing secondary school in 1939, he entered Masaryk University as a student of medicine, determined to follow in his father's foot steps. He was forced to abandon his studies, however, because in the fall of 1939, all Czech universities were closed by the Nazis.

Jan Firbas began attending the Institute of Modern Languages, which remained open, and later taught English and German at several secondary schools. He returned to Masaryk University after the war to study English and philosophy at the Faculty of Arts. He graduated in 1947, was awarded a Ph.D. in 1948 and became a member of that faculty's Department of English and American Studies as an assistant to Professor Josef Vachek in 1949.

From 1949 he was a member of the Department of English and American Studies of the faculty until his death in 2000.

He became a member of the Prague Linguistics Circle, which was outlawed by the communist government. Persecution from the communist government and the fact that he came from an old Protestant family and refused to renounce his belief significantly delayed his academic career.

After being granted the degree of Candidate of Science by Charles University and defending his habilitation dissertation at Masaryk University, he was appointed associate professor in 1966. He handed in his Doctor of Science dissertation to Charles University in 1971, but as a result of increasing political and religious oppression in Czechoslovakia following the 1968 Soviet invasion, he had to wait for the fall of the communist regime to be awarded the doctoral degree and named a university professor at Masaryk University.

Despite his international renown, it took him ten years to have his habilitation officially approved and he was only made Professor in 1990.In 1986, he was awarded Honorary Doctorates by the Universities of Leuven and Leeds, and in 2000 by the University of Turku. Even though he was frequently invited to give lecture series at universities across the globe in the 1970s and 80s, he could freely accept the invitations only after the fall of the communist regime in November 1989.

Much to the displeasure of the communist authorities, who disliked his religious beliefs and his distrust of their ideology, Jan Firbas won a world-wide reputation for his scholarly work. He received numerous invitations during his lifetime to lecture at universities across Europe, the United States, and India. Apart from various short-term visits to foreign universities, he spent several semesters in abroad: in 1948, he worked on phonetics with Professors A. C.Gimson and J. D. O'Connor in London, in 1969-70 he lectured as a visiting professor at the University of Erlangen and Nuremberg, in 1973-74 he carried out research at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in Wassenaar and in 1984-85, on an invitation from Professor Randolph Quirk, he worked at University College London. Jan Firbas's academic merit was acknowledged by three honorary doctorates awarded to him by the Universities of Leeds (United Kingdom, 1984), Leuven (Belgium, 1984), and Turku (Finland, 2000).

Jan Firbas devoted his entire life to the study the of the theme-rheme (topicfocus). Structure of the sentence. He introduced the term functional sentence perspective which has been adopted by numerous functional linguists for the analysis of information flow in communication. Firbas's theory of functional sentence perspective is a structuralist and functionalist approach to language, studying the complex relations between the syntactic, semantic, contextual, and prosodic levels of language. Jan Firbas presented the results of his research and he principles of the Brno approach to functional sentence perspective, which he had founded, in over 150 publications including his definitive monograph entitled Functional sentence perspective in written and spoken communication (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Firbas developed a theory of Information Structure called Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP), inspired by the work of Vilém Mathesius. It is Jan Firbas who is to be credited with the first use of the term Functional Sentence Perspective. He wrote more than 100 papers on the subject and published a comprehensive account of his approach to information structure of language as a monograph¹ in 1992.

In linguistics, Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) is a theory describing the information structure of the sentence and language communication in general. It has been developed in the tradition of the Prague School of Functional and Structural Linguistics together with its sister theory, Topic-Focus Articulation.

The Prague School of Linguistics - as a representative of a functional approach to language - devoted a considerable attention to the theory of FSP. The founder of the so called „aktuálního členění větného“in Czech context is Vilém Mathesius (1947).

He introduced a twofold interpretation of sentences and distinguished two content elements which every utterance consists of:

1) the element about which something is stated = the basis (theme);

“východisko/téma/základ”

2) what is stated about the basis = the nucleus (rheme); “jádro/réma”

The unmarked sequence of these two elements is Th – Rh = objective order, the reverse sequence Rh – Th is called subjective order and is perceived as marked with emotiveness.

For the further discussion, it is useful to draw a line between the formal and the functional description of a sentence. In the former approach the sentence is assumed to be a part of the language system (langue), in the latter it is regarded as an utterance, as a part of a context (on the level of parole). As Firbas (1974) emphasizes, the theory of FSP constitutes a part of the so called three-level approach to syntax which includes the semantic level, the grammatical level and the level of contextual organization (FSP). If a sentence is uttered, it necessarily has a context. So, the utterance is seen as embedded in its context. FSP is a property of uttered sentences (utterances), which means that it always operates within a context.

He continued in the tradition of Mathesius but introduced a new concept of as the ground of FSP – Communicative dynamism (CD). Every sentence contains an element toward which it is orientated (perspectived) and which contributes most to the development of the communication and completes it. Such an element carriers the highest degree of CD = the most dynamic element. Any linguistic element (a clause, a phrase, a word, a morpheme) can become a carrier of CD, as long as it conveys information (meaning) and participates in the development of communication . From this point of view, FSP is defined as the distribution of dynamic elements over a sentence. CD is in the sentence realized in degrees. As was said above, FSP -and thus CD as well - are phenomena of an act of communication (parole), hence it is impossible to set its degrees objectively by a particular figure; it is not measurable, its value is always given in relation to other elements involved. On that account it has to be viewed rather as a relative value. That obviously differs by individual elements; some elements contribute less (are less dynamic), other more (more dynamic elements) to the development of CD. The extent of contribution of the elements depends extensively on the character of information they convey, whether it is retrievable or irretrievable from the immediately relevant preceding linguistic context.

Each sentence can be interpreted in regard to the hierarchy of carriers of CD², from those with the lowest degree to those with the highest degree of CD. This is called by Firbas interpretative arrangement and it always takes into account the relative value concerning the elements in that particular utterance. The interpretative arrangement corresponds to the gradual rise in CD. It may coincide with linear arrangement (word order from the grammatical point of view), but needs not.

Firbas sees the sentence as a field, on which the semantic relations and the syntactic structure are interlinked and within which the degrees of CD are distributed. This underlines the functional approach: the sentence is induced to function in a particular perspective and serves as a distributional field (DF). The syntactic elements constitute communicative units (CU). One sentence can be interpreted not only on the level of the main distributional field, but also on the level of distributional sub/-fields (sub-clauses, semi-clauses, nominal phrases); each of them provides its own communicative units: “every distributional field is perspectived towards the communicative units that carriers the highest degree of CD”(Firbas).

Peter decided that he would learn foreign languages. CU on the main DF: Peter decided *that he would learn foreign languages. subject verb object CU on the DF of second rank: that he would learn *foreign languages. conjunction subject verb object CU on the DF of third rank: *foreign languages attribute headword The basic distribution of communicative dynamism is than such which proceeds from elements with the lowest degree to those with the highest degree, the scale of the basic distribution of CD being divided into thematic and non-thematic elements. The most basic differentiation comprises: theme (Th), transition (Tr) and rheme (Rh). Firbas elaborated it even further on:

thematic elements: → theme proper and diatheme

non-thematic elements: - transitional → transition, transition proper - rhematic → rheme and rheme proper

He was a hard working scholar who devoted all his energy and free time to research. He tried to obtain a most detailed view of the properties of language communication and formulated his observations with the utmost precision. He greatly feared being misunderstood and was deeply unhappy about several instances of misinterpretation of his theory by scholars who had not paid enough attention to the complexity of the theory and who rejected his views after only a superficial reading of some of his publications. Though very busy, he did not hesitate to write a new paper in response to the objections raised, explaining with still greater precision the misunderstood aspect of his theory.

In spite of his prominent academic position, Jan Firbas was a very modest and compassionate person. He treated everyone as his peer, never boasting of his academic achievements. He showed great sympathy for other people and actively helped those in need. His home became a refuge for several gravely-ill members of his family in the final, most difficult stages of their lives, which he and his wife Helena tried to alleviate. Jan Firbas showed an equal understanding for the personal problems of his university colleagues and supported them as an experienced advisor. He was a model family man, a loving father of two sons and a man devoted to his wife, who stood by him with loving care and boundless encouragement through the end of his life.

Jan Firbas died on 5 May 2000 in Brno, the city where he had stayed for most of his life.

Список литературы

Firbas, J.: Functional Sentence Perspective in Written and Spoken Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1992.

Firbas, Jan: Collected works of Jan Firbas (Vol. I). Edited by Aleš Svoboda, Jana Chamonikolasová, and Ludmila Urbanová. Brno: Masaryk University Press, 2010.

Hladký, Josef (Ed.): Language and function: to the memory of Jan Firbas, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003.

1^ Firbas, J.: Functional Sentence Perspective in Written and Spoken Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1992.

2^ Communicative dynamism

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