Microsoft Word Theoretical Course of English Grammar

participial constructions. For instance: 
I saw him crossing the street.
( 
him crossing the street
= predicative word-
group in the function of complex object); 
They got into the car and drove away, the dog running after them barking. 
(
the dog running after them barking 
= predicative word-group, so called Nomina-
tive Absolute Participial Construction in the function of adverbial modifier of at-
tending circumstances). 
Communicative Structure of the Sentence
(Functional Sentence Perspective) 
The theory that studies the communicative structure of the sentence is called 
Functional 
Sentence Perspective, 
originally known as 
Actual Division of the Sentence. 
It was worked out 
by the scholars of the Prague Linguistic School. The purpose of Functional Sentence Perspecive 
is to reveal the correlative significance of the sentence parts from the point of view of their 
informative role in an utterance, i.e. the immediate semantic contribution they make to the 
total information conveyed by the sentence in the context of connected speech. In other words, 
Functional Sentence Perspective which implies the actual division of the sentence in fact 
exposes its informative, or communicative structure.
The essence of the Functional Sentence Perspective theory lies in the following fact:
when one speaks or writes one conveys information which is organized into communicative 
structure of sentences the main components of which are the theme and the rheme. The theme 
represents the starting point of the utterance, denoting an entity or a phenomenon about which 
something is reported, while the rheme represents the basic informative part of the communi-
cation, i.e. what is said in connection with the theme. Between the theme and the rheme are 

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Theoretical Course of English Grammar 
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