Comparison of the History and Application of Theme

Upon the Functional Sentence Perspective(FSP),linguists have proposed different researches.The Prague school applies the theory to the analysis of the informational structure of sentences.Halliday,initiator of the systemic functional grammar,applies the theory to the discourse analysis.However,the two schools have different interpretation of the theory,and give it different definitions.This paper mainly introduces the history of the two different branches of the FSP,compares their initiatives,defining criteria, and applications.It proposes that FSP should apply to the informational analysis on one hand,and to the discourse analysis on the other hand under the same theme-rheme configuration.