Communicative dynamism

In the Prague School's work on functional sentence perspective (i.e. information structure), communicative dynamism is a gradient notion that determines word order in free-order languages like Czech. The degree of communicative dynamism of a sentence element is the extent to which it pushes the communication forward and the elements with least communicative dynamism (those that are contextually known) precede those that have more communicative dynamism (those that convey new information).

References

• Eroms, Hans-Werner. 1986. Funktionale Satzperspektive (= Germanistische Arbeitshefte 34). Tübingen: Niemeyer.
• Firbas, Jan. 1964. On Defining the Theme in Functional Sentence Analysis. In Travaux Linguistiques de Prague 1/64, 267-280.
• Firbas, Jan. 1971. On the concept of Communicative Dynamism in the theory of Functional Sentence Perspective. In Sbornik prací filosofické fakulti brnenské universiti A 19/71, 135-144.
• Firbas, Jan. 1984. Carriers of Communicative Dynamism. In Prague Studies in English XVIII/84, 63-73.