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The paper compares the cleft construction in Engli h and Norwegian. The analysis is carried out on a sample of 100 English and 100 Norwegian examples translated from Czech. The paper focuses on the motivation for the use of the cleft con !ruction. There are three main types of motivation described here: FSP, textual and syntactic. The FSP motivation is recognised either when the Czech original includes some explicit focusing device or when the only function of the cleft is to give more prominence to the focu ed element. The types of textual motivation analysed in this thesis are contra t, selection, identification, summarising function , topic launching and topic linking. The syntactic motivation appears to play its role in English clefts with a negative or restrictive adjunct in focus becau e the non-cleft counterpart would require an S-V inversion and would be stylistically marked. The second type of syntactic motivation appears in Norwegian interrogative clefts. The main function of the cleft construction in these sentences is to move the rhematic element from the subject position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines modified noun phrases with respect to the relations between their FSP structure, realization form and textual role. All four FSP structures are dealt with. The con-figuration with both context-independent components, represented by book titles, shows as the prevalent pattern the modifier in pre-position, which reflects the basic order of adjective-noun in both languages. In this arrangement the rhematic component, the modifier, precedes the thematic head noun. Within the body of the text, recurrent noun phrases whose modifiers have two realization forms show a tendency to a shift from postmodification at the first occurrence to premodification at further occurrences, thus signalling the context-dependence of the whole noun phrase. The configuration of context-independent modifier and context-dependent head is found where the head noun denotes a textual theme or subtheme, which occurs either with new modifiers or with modifiers disengaged from context-dependence by one of the context-disengaging factors. Here Czech has a specific means, due to its free word order, the postposition of adjectives. Similarly in the case of context-dependent modifier and context-independent head recurrent modifiers are found where they refer to textual themes or subthemes. The influence of the FSP functions of the NP's components on the realization form of the modifier appears to be only one of the factors involved, the others being the existence of two semantically equivalent realization forms, the basic order adjective - noun, the tendency of academic texts to condensed forms of expression, functional style and possibly others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]