Dogs must be carried on the escalator : (a case study in FSP potentiality)

This article presents a case study in functional sentence perspective. Here, Firbas applies his theory to a potentially ambiguous brief text – a public notice – as it is rendered in a humorous cartoon. The present study is one of only a few in which Firbas deals with some other than serious texts, which in his case were usually texts of a literary or technical nature. His analysis is valuable in that he meticulously sets out, among other things, the contrasting interpretations of the text from the different points of view of the cartoon characters and the encoder. In that sense, the study, while being one of the last papers written by Firbas, is remarkably modern: it notes the potentiality of the functional sentence perspective of an utterance by locating the actual meaning within the nexus between the text's producer and its ultimate recipients (interpreters). Although Firbas eventually argues for the disambiguating role of intonation that assists in what might be seen as the "correct" or "preferred" interpretation of the actual utterance, it is evident that this article can be read as an indication of Firbas's ability to shift from a strictly positivist structural analysis of data towards a much more context-bound interpretation that involves the subjective, and potentially clashing, interpretations of various discourse participants.