The initial aim of the book was to describe Polish equivalents of the English articles. The
functions of the articles were found in Polish to be expressed by word order and sentence
stress (in neutral intonation). Word order and sentence stress were also analysed in English in
view of the different nature of word order. Native speakers were asked to read given texts
which were recorded and to comment on the intonation. The author concludes that the functions
of the articles are part of Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) and that the general tendency
is to put new information in final position. In Polish this is achieved by word order and
sentence stress in English by stress and some syntactic means. Furthermore it is found that in
both English and Polish the noun determines the position of the sentence stress - it always
falls on the new noun if such is present in the absence of such a noun the stress is put on
the next available word as far to the end of the sentence aspossible.
