Craig,
I should have mentioned Jan Firbas' Functional sentence perspective in
written and spoken communication (Cambridge University Press 1992) as
an excellent discussion of the Prague School concepts and their
development. I should also have mentioned Ellen Prince's crucial paper
"Toward a taxonomy of given-new information" in Peter Cole's Radical
Pragmatics (Academic Press 1981).
Herb
________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
Sent: Monday, October 31, 2005 9:37 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Syntax question
Herb,
Halliday himself mentions "The Prague School" as an earlier source
for these insights.
My presentation at 4C's in Chicago next March (as part of a New
Public Grammar panel) will be on "Subject Function as a Window into
Functional Grammar". It's a good starting point precisely because there
is immediate payoff. Students seem to pick it up very quickly and find
it useful. (My grammar students have spread it into composition classes
on occasion.)
Halliday uses the term "theme" (theme/rheme) to designate the
sentence opening word group as a stepping off point for the message
structure of the clause. (Rheme is what's left.) More often than not,
it is "conflated" (combined) with the grammatical subject (which is the
focus of a predication, at least in a normal declarative sentence.)
You're right; theme is realized in an English clause by being first. The
other subject function would be something like "actor" (though that term
differs depending on what kind of representative process is being
presented. In a material process clause, it's the doer of the action.)
When something other than grammatical subject opens the sentence, it's a
"marked theme". If done well (as in your fourth sentence, which begins
with "in English" or your later sentence which opens with "typically"),
it gives us a highly useful (thematic) point of departure.
Outside, the wind blew cold. Inside, the fire burned warm.
If you look at the kinds of rhetorical choices open to writers,
marked theme is among the most useful and most flexible. It gives us a
sort of topical stepping off point, and it also sometimes allows us to
put more emphasis on other new information in clause ending emphasis
slot. (If I write "The wind blew cold outside", then cold is no longer
quite so emphatic.) In this example, we can see how it works
independently of (in harmony with?) given and new.
This is a common understanding within functional grammar, one of the
ways in which it opens up a text for interpretive analysis. (What it
means and how it means are intertwined. The choices are not merely
stylistic. Starting your sentence with "in English" is a highly
meaningful choice.)
That's a very brief foray into the subject. Students pick it up
very quickly if you let them manipulate sentences and consider the
nuances of meaning that result.
Craig
Stahlke, Herbert F.W. wrote:
Topic-comment terminology and concepts come out of several strands of
functional linguistic analysis, starting at least with early Halliday
work and probably going back farther than that. Topic has been
discussed extensively in connection with definitions of subjecthood.
The Chinese example that Johanna gave is an example why linguists argue
that Chinese is a topic-comment language rather than a subject-predicate
language. Topic comes initially in a sentence, but there is no other
grammatical or morphological marking of subjecthood in Chinese. In
English, subjects are usually topics, but we have structures, like some
of those under discussion in this thread, which allow us to make
something else topic. We also have sentences that start with subjects
that aren't topics, like
It's raining.
It looks like UCLA will win the PAC-10.
There's an elephant behind that tree.
Typically such sentences are used to introduce new content (focus) at
the end of the sentence that then becomes the topic of the discourse.
"Topical" refers usually to nominal structures in a sentence that are
neither topic nor focus, have been previously mentioned or are in some
other way salient, and are not in topic or focus position. In the
sequence
I just talked to Mary. John gave her a ring. It had a fake stone.
"Mary" is in focus. "John" is topic. "her" is topical, and "a ring" is
in focus. "It" is topic, and "a fake stone" is in focus, so it might
well become the subject of the next sentence.
Topic continuity and the given-new contract are concepts that can be
very useful in the teaching of writing because they name crucial
elements of discourse structure.
Herb
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Paul E.
Doniger
Sent: Sun 10/30/2005 9:09 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Syntax question
Johanna is right. I didn't know that the reduntant pronoun was called
"topic-comment" (it sounds like an odd term to me), but it seems to me
that it can be very effective rhythmically. Labelling it as
ungrammatical in all cases does seem extreme.
It occurs in French, too. I think it's a song by Edith Piaf that has the
line, "Quand j'ai fame, moi j'ai le pain." It's a downright beautiful
line!
Paul D.
Johanna Rubba <[log in to unmask]> <mailto:[log in to unmask]> wrote:
..........
As to topic-comment, this terminology appears in some writing manuals
with reference to structures such as "My father, he seldom votes". They
are labeled outright ungrammatical, which I find a little extreme. I
view the Beowulf example as similar. Topic-comment syntax is standard
in some languages. A rough example I recall from my
structure-of-Chinese course is "Elephant, nose is long", which would be
translated as "Elephants have long noses". I can imagine a novice
writer writing something like "As far as elephants, they have long
noses".
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