>ČASOPIS PRO MODERNÍ FILOLOGII 2026 (108) 1
English Preverbal Rhematic Subjects: Identification and Realisation by Slovak and Czech Speakers
ABSTRACT (en)
The paper explores the ability of Slovak and Czech university students of English to identify Eng lish preverbal rhematic subjects and mark them prosodically by placing the nucleus on them. As this prosodic pattern is unusual in the students’ native languages, which favour final rhemes, the parti cipants were expected to overuse final nucleus in English.
They were recorded while reading a short English text containing presentation sentences and their recordings were analysed. Subsequently, the participants were asked to translate the text into their respective native languages and the rhemes identified by nucleus placement in English were compared with the intuitive rheme identification manifested by word order.
The results confirmed that Slovak and Czech speakers tend to place the nucleus in English on the final element even when it is informationally marginal. Rather surprisingly, the interference of English word order in Slovak and Czech translations proved stronger than expected. Additionally, unlike native English speakers, Slovaks and Czechs tended to split even short sentences into two in tonation phrases, obscuring their ability to identify the rhemes.
KEYWORDS (en)
subject, rheme, intonation, word order, interference
KLÍČOVÁ SLOVA (cz)
podmět, réma, intonace, slovosled, interference
DOI
https://doi.org/10.14712/23366591.2026.1.4
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