Theory of communicative sentence structure as a reflection of topic-rhematic relations

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Baku Slavic university

Theory of communicative sentence structure as a reflection of topic-rhematic relations

Valiyeva G.I.

Annotation

This theory allows the definitions of “topic-rhema” to be divided into two types. The first type of definitions identifies the notion of “topic” with «data”, i.e. with those parts of sentences which are carriers of information already known from the context (or situation), and “rhema” with a sentence segment which is a carrier of new information. According to another type of definitions, the subject is the subject of speech, and the rhema is what is reported about the subject of speech. The supporters of the first type of definitions include A. Weil, P Adamets, S. Kuno. The second type of definitions goes back to the works of other prominent scholars: G. Gabelenz, P Sgall, etc.

The main argument put forward against the first type of treatment of the “topic” and “rhema” membership, based on the “given” and “new” of the reported information, is that the rhema can also refer to the “given”. On the other hand, the topic can also be independent of the antecedent context. The objections raised have led the authors of new research to resort to more cautious formulations. For example, it has become quite obvious: the function of topic can be performed not only by an element known from the context, but also by members of sentences that point to a known, unambiguously identifiable phenomenon within a given concrete reality. One of the conditions for singling out any members of a sentence as a topicalization is contextual constraint, i.e. the presence of the given concept in the preceding part of the text, as well as the presence of data about the object arising from the situation and from the general conditions of the given utterance. The second condition of topicalization is a low degree of communicative load of the given sentence member. The term “communicative load” is a paraphrase of the term “communicative dynamism”, i.e. a hierarchy determined by the case function and the degree of information load of the members in the semantic structure of the sentence.

Key words: theory, communicative structure, thematization, sentence member, communicative load, actualization.

Анотація

Валієва Г.І. Теорія комунікативної структури пропозиції як відображення тематико-рематичних відносин

У статті досліджено теорію комунікативної структури пропозиції, яка дозволяє розділити визначення «тема-рема» на два типи. Перший тип визначень ототожнює поняття «тема» з «даними», тобто з тими частинами пропозицій, які є носіями інформації, вже відомої з контексту (або ситуації), а «рема» з сегментом пропозиції, носій нової інформації. Згідно з іншим типом визначень, суб'єкт це предмет мови, а рема-це те, що повідомляється про предмет мови. До прихильників першого типу визначень відносяться А. Вейль, П. Адамець, С. Куно. Другий тип визначень сходить до робіт інших видатних вчених: Г. Габеленца, П. Сгалла та ін.

Основний аргумент, висунутий проти першого типу трактування приналежності до «теми» і “rhema”, заснований на «даній» і «нової» інформації, що повідомляється, полягає в тому, що rhema може також ставитися до «даного». З іншого боку, тема також може бути незалежною від попереднього контексту. Висловлені заперечення змусили авторів нового дослідження вдатися до більш обережних формулювань. Наприклад, стало цілком очевидно: функцію теми може виконувати не тільки елемент, відомий з контексту, а й члени пропозицій, що вказують на відоме, однозначно ідентифіковане явище в рамках даної конкретної реальності.

Однією з умов виділення будь-яких членів пропозиції в якості тематизації є контекстуальне обмеження, тобто наявність даного поняття в попередній частині тексту, а також наявність даних про об'єкт, що випливають із ситуації і із загальних умов даного висловлювання. Другою умовою актуалізації є низька ступінь комунікативної навантаження даного члена пропозиції. Термін «комунікативне навантаження» є парафразом терміна «комунікативний динамізм», тобто ієрархія, яка визначається відмінкової функцією і ступенем інформаційного навантаження членів в семантичній структурі пропозиції.

Ключові слова: теорія, комунікативна структура, тематизація, член пропозиції, комунікативне навантаження, актуалізація.

The problem statement

According to V. Mathesius, formal-grammatical membership, is related to the construction of the sentence, its structure; topical membership in turn is established in accordance with “the extent to which the sentence involves a certain real and speech situation” [10, p. 106]. Among those linguistic means that provide topical membership in different types of linguistic texts V. Mathesius put the word order in the first place in all variants. According to the scientist's observations, the most usual word order in a sentence is the one when the statement is its starting point. The scientist called this word order objective. The order of succession when the base and the core of the statement change places, W. Mathesius called subjective.

The purpose of the work is to analyze the theory of the communicative structure of a sentence as a reflection of thematic-rhematic relations.

The main material. Another linguist Fibras noted that the objective word order proclaimed by W. Mathesius “is most characteristic of the Slavic group of languages” [1, p. 36]. At the same time, he emphasized that “regardless of the syntactic redistribution of the semantic components of the sentence and in the languages of the Germanic group, their sequence is also characteristic of the expression of semantic or informational structures” [2, p. 38].

P. Adamec back in the distant 1966 was one of the first not only in Czech but also in world linguistics to try to carry out a comparative analysis of sentences of various constructions with the languages of the Germanic group, English in the first place. He based his classification on the spectrum of different linear dynamic structures, while at the same time defining those “syntactic constructions” that emerged on the basis of these structures.

P. Adamec's study thus significantly advanced the study of word order in the two languages of interest to us in this dissertation. Henceforth, when establishing topic-meaning relations in linguistic texts, none of the objectively thinking scholars could do without confirming the significance of such a factor of topical membership as word position.

Probably inspired by the results of the Prague School's research, linguists from other countries also began to use this idea to explain lexico-semantic and syntactic phenomena of other languages. For example, M. Halliday [6] used the theory of communicative membership to justify the phenomena of phrase accentuation of syntactic transformations in English, I. Bekeshi to explain the structural features of text units equal to a paragraph.

After the publication of the named and some other works, the problem of topical membership is inextricably linked with various means of its expression. For example, many foreign scholars propose to consider lexicon, grammar and syntax as a whole from the communicative-functional perspective [Leech, Svartik 1983 [9], Valin 1997 [13], Koktova 1999 [8].

In the last two or three decades of the 20th century, the theory of communicative membership has received a clear focus on the study of the semantic meaning of texts in connection with their structurization [6]. Further, from the time of G. Gabelenz's research in this field up to our days, linguists have more and more effectively and widely applied the theory of communicative membership to describe different languages, English first of all, because it was easier to carry out comparative analysis of the subject and rheme on their basis. However, the obvious drawback of many studies was that they were not based on common, generally accepted terms and concepts.

Thus, W. Mathesius introduced the term (“actual division of the sentence”), but soon other terms appeared in European linguistics, namely: “information structure of the clause” Halliday's term; functional sentence perspective Danesh's term); “contextual utterance organization” Fibras's term); “topic-comment structure” Hes-Lutich's term; “theme-rheme structure” Halliday's term and some others. However, we would like to note with satisfaction that “topical membership” proved to be the most appropriate for English texts, because they are known to have a mobile word order. It was this term of Matesius that gave impetus to the development of the theory of “communicative membership”. This theory reflects the topic-meaning relations in linguistic texts in the best possible way.

Probably, following M.A. Halliday, many authors [3; 9; 2] have increasingly started to use both interpretations of communicative membership as relevant: the first interpretation is taken into account as membership into “topic” and “comment” (topic-comment), and the second into “topic” and “rhema” respectively.

As it turned out, a known sentence member can also act as a rhema, which means that “givenness” is no longer regarded as a sufficient criterion for defining a theme. Along with familiarity and givenness, the criterion of presence in the foreground in the recipient's consciousness according to the speaker's assumption, correlation of the communicative act with a limited segment of reality, as well as presence “on the surface” in the consciousness of the speaker and the recipient also act as characteristic features of the topic [5]. M.A. Halliday, Quirk, Greenbaum [6] identify the feature of topic familiarity with deductive ability, reproducibility and predictability. communicative semantic sentence topic-rhema

This interpretation of the theory of communicative membership turned out to be similar to the interpretation common in the Prague School, according to which the subject is the member of the sentence characterized by the lowest degree of “communicative dynamism” and the rhema represents an antonymous process. J. Fibras, dealing with this issue, concluded that communicative dynamism is “the full-fledged deployment of information in the course of the generation of an utterance, as well as the relative contribution of each member of the sentence to the presentation of the information to be communicated. With regard to “communicative dynamism, also the main problem is the lack of a precise definition and a unified interpretation” [5, c. 113-114]. According to A. Svoboda [7], “it is possible to accurately calculate the level of communicative dynamism in relation to any members of sentences, which as this scientist believes is inversely proportional to contextual dependence. This dependence, in turn, can be determined by calculating the grammatical and functional levels of the same or related elements of the text” [7, c. 53].

This statement of Freedom could well, in our opinion, be taken as a working definition of the theory we are discussing. However, we must admit that it is more theoretical than practical. We believe that Fibras's statements are of a more applied character for the study of topic-rhematic relations. Thus, giving his examples, J. Fibras emphasizes that “communicative dynamism does not depend primarily on contextual subordination, but primarily on the case function of sentence members, i.e. on their semantic load in the case structure of the sentence” [5, p. 35].

Developing the ideas of V. Mathesius and his student J. Fibras suggests “to consider a sentence as a gamut of shades of communicative dynamism, from zero to the maximum degree” [11, p. 10]. As the degree of communicative dynamism increases, the main elements become more and more rhema, as their semantic-contextual, and, consequently, communicative load increases. The binary division of the sentence into core and base, or theme and rhema, is replaced by the understanding of the sentence as a gamut of available shades of communicative dynamism, which are carried by different words in the sentence.

There is no exact boundary between thematic and rhema groups of words, the transition from one to the other is gradual, and different words have different shades of thematicity and rhema; these shades depend on different factors: on the semantic weight of the word, on its contextual relations, on the grammatical construction of the phrase, on the position of the word in the sentence.

P. Sgall demonstrates a fundamentally different approach to this problem. He considers the subject to be the subject of speech, and the rheme to be what we assert about the subject of speech. In most of his variations, this scientist identifies communicative structures of sentences with logical constructions. In contrast to this statement, P. Sgall and his colleagues [12] believe that the difference between logical and semantic sentence structures is that in the latter, sentence members are also capable of performing communicative functions, while in the former they are not.

The studies of the early 1970s are also characterized by the combination of two approaches in treating the elements of communicative sentence structures: “topic + rheme” and “topical + comment”. What does this mean? At first glance, the definitions of “topik” and “comment”, introduced by C.F. Hockett, which are rather florid for the terms, nevertheless quickly gained popularity among the representatives of the Prague school, temporarily even replacing “topic” and “rhema”. P. Sgall and his colleagues believe that the phrase structure “topical comment” is one of the manifestations of the communicative process in the course of which the speaker brings to the fore a concept known to the recipient and attempts to change the recipient's perception of it.

Further research in the 1980s and 1990s on the communicative membership of sentences revealed that there is more than just the sametype relevant communicative dichotomy in sentences. It is not accidental that a decade earlier, more precisely in 1974, in the publication of the Prague School's research under the general editorship of F. Danesh, along with the traditional “topic-rhema” and “topical-comment” division, a three-component and even four-component communicative membership of sentences is found for the first time. For example, E. Benesch proposes membership into “topic” and “base”, and within the base he singles out “rhema”. J. Fibras proposes the membership “topic-transition-rhema”, W. Dressler the structures “topic + rhema” and “topik + comment” [4].

Of all the variety of approaches to the interpretation of topical sentence membership, we can designate the main one, called by most authors “topical-comment” (less often “topic-rhema”). It is based on the fact of separating the nominal or adverbial introductory segment of a sentence from its integral part, i.e. it is a membership based on the given as well as the new content of the reported information and assuming the presence of a marked segment in the sentence a carrier of new information.

The center of research of “topical-comment” structures, which is based on the former interpretation of communicative membership of sentences, at present, that is, even in the first decade of the XXI century, is the University of California. First of all, we should mention here the works of C.N. Lee and S.A. Thompson, who were engaged in the development of the syntactic side of this problem.

C.N. Lee and S.A. Thompson recognize that in the syntactic systems of some languages the topical-comment structure plays the same determining role as the subject-noun structure in the syntactic systems of other languages. The syntactic systems of languages belonging to two different types of communicative sentence membership, which the authors classify as topic-prominence and subject-prominence, differ significantly from each other. C.N. Lee and S.A. Thompson believe that the phenomenon of relative subject or topical prominence, which is present in the syntactic system of every language, can be used to construct a syntactic typology of langue C.N. Lee and S.A. Thompson did not conduct a systematic comparative analysis of the syntax of topical-prominent and subject-prominent languages, but, despite this, they managed to reveal a large number of features inherent in different types of languages. For example, in subject-prominent languages there is a formal subject, the use of which is obligatory in cases with a subjectless predicate (e.g. impersonal verbs), while in topical-prominent languages there is no such phenomenon. The use of passive constructions is characteristic of subject-prominent languages; the possibility of omitting the anaphoric pronoun in subject-prominent languages depends on the form of the subject, and in topical-prominent languages on the topical. The choice of topics in subject-prominent languages is largely restricted, whereas in topical-prominent languages this choice is free.

In assessing other features, C.N. Lee and S.A. Thompson express controversial opinions, for example, they believe that in subject-prominent languages sentences with the structure “topical-comment” do not belong to the main types of sentences. The topical functions in English are performed only by such members of sentences which have shifted to the beginning by means of transformations called topicalization or left dislocation by the authors, for example, John, I haven't seen; As for John, I haven't seen [2, p. 156-158].

At the same time, we note that there are more than a dozen alternatives to the term's topic and rhema in the linguistic literature, except for the “topical comment” we have considered in detail. To designate the concept of the subject of judgment expressed verbally in a sentence, such terms as “subject of utterance”, “psychological subject”, “given”, “basis of utterance”, “topic”, “background”, “topic” are used. Predicate was labeled by G. Paul as “meaningful word”, other grammarians have it as “valuable”, “psychological predicate”, “new”, “core of an utterance”, “rhema”, “predicator”, “focus”, “comment”, V.D. Ivshin in one of his recent works proposes the term “predicam”. The use of the concepts of “psychological predicate” and “psychological subject” back in the early days of the study of semantic sentence membership is connected with the name of such a scientist as G. Paul, who used the mentioned membership to explain the semantic and functional differences of different topic-rhematic variants within one complex sentence.

The “strong”, in his terminology, member of the sentence, he considered the psychological predicate, on which falls the logical accent and the message, which is the actual purpose of the statement. Another emphasis, in his opinion, falls on the psychological subject; other less emphasized members of the sentence perform the role of connecting members [11, p. 310]. The progressiveness of G. Paul's views consisted in the fact that it is possible to distinguish these concepts in almost every sentence, except for those rare cases when the psychological subject or, perhaps, the predicate is implicit in the speech situation itself. Regarding the sequence of these two components of sentences, the scientist noted that in human consciousness the psychological subject always precedes the psychological predicate, however, in speech this order can be inverted. In most cases there are no restrictions regarding the case function and what category of parts of speech are expressed by the members of the sentence, acting as a psychological subject and predicate, but the negation or question word will always be psychological predicates.

Conclusions

Thus, the main components of topical sentence membership are nowadays considered by linguists from different aspects depending on the nature and tasks of the research. In this connection, it seems to us more legitimate to use the traditional terms subject and rheme to name the two basic members of this dichotomy because of the greater neutrality of the internal form of these words. We believe that these terms most clearly denote the essence of the phenomena themselves. In the future, when referring to the various means of expressing rhema-thematic relations in different linguistic texts in English, we will adhere to these terms, which, we repeat, are traditional and well-proven.

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