A number of colleagues have asked me to prepare a synthesis of my publications on functional sentence perspective (FSP), which have appeared in various periodicals but are not always easily accessible. Among the British scholars it is especially Professors Sir Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum and Geoffrey Leech who have urged me to present such a synthesis. This is why I have gratefully accepted Professor Greenbaum's invitation to publish my book on FSP in the present series.

Inspired by the work of Vilém Mathesius, Josef Vachek, František Daneš and Maria Schubiger, I published my first paper on FSP in 1957, at a time when it was particularly Czechoslovakia where the problems of FSP were considered to be of special importance for a better understanding of how the sentence functions at the moment of communication. Since then, I have been gradually developing a theory of FSP covering both the written and the spoken language. I have been doing so predominantly on an empirical basis, concentrating on English but frequently comparing it with other languages, especially Czech, German and French. In the meantime a veritable explosion of interest in FSP has taken place (its problems being treated also under such headings as ‘theme–rheme structure’, ‘topic–focus structure’, ‘information structure’).

My endeavour to accompany my arguments by as many examples as possible and also limitations of space have prevented me from making my synthesis as comprehensive as I should have wished it to be and from presenting the reader with an all-inclusive and adequate survey of the state of the art.