Porre,comporre, disporre. Dai giudizi tetici agli enunciati tetici, ai temi e ai loro correlati

The aim of this paper is to identify the theoretical and terminological genesis of \r\none of the two basic notions of Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP), namely that of theme, or \r\nbasis, of the sentence. Its origin is found in Mathesius’ 1911 article on ellipsis. The choice of \r\nsuch a topic permits a logico-psychological elaboration of speech units inasmuch as ellipsis is \r\ntaken into consideration as consisting of a missing word, quod non dictum tamen cogitatur. The \r\nchoice of one-member sentences, especially those without a verb, is convenient from two \r\ndifferent perspectives: it recognizes non-standard structures, if compared to the ideal type of the \r\nsubject – predicate double articulation, and it considers them to be par excellence \r\nrepresentatives of the non- synthetic, but rather thetic function of judgements and sentences. The \r\nterm “one-member thetic sentences” derives from the theory of judgement Mathesius learned \r\nfrom Marty’s philosophy of language. This in turn was fashioned according to Brentano’s \r\nclassification of psychic phenomena. It is thus possible to reconstruct a fine dissemination of \r\nphilosophical middle-European thought in linguistic research at the beginning of the Twentieth \r\nCentury in Bohemia, which is significantly earlier than previously attested to in the literature. \r\nMoreover, not only are the syntactic roots of FSP put in evidence, but also the logico-semantic \r\nand semantic-communicative ones , a well-established Prague tradition, long before the Circle’s \r\nfoundation.