Testing Semantic Homogeneity of the Rhematic Track Through Parallel Annotation of Information Structure (A Case Study in FSP Potentiality)

Martin Drápela

The article presents the results of a short parallel analysis of information structure of a stretch of an English folk tale. The analysis, carried out within the framework of functional sentence perspective (FSP), was designed in order to verify a claim made about the rhematic track (layer) of the stretch by Jan Firbas in a paper published in 1981, and was oriented towards finding a degree of annotator agreement in places of FSP potentiality. The results seem to confrm Firbas’s claim that a reader's awareness of the phenomenon of semantic homogeneity may contribute to a more accurate reading of the message of the text.