Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics.pdf

A-Z 1197characteristics. Although each of these criteria is relevant to a certain extent, theynevertheless do not suffice for a proper definition. For one thing, the terms used in thedefinition are themselves imprecise and need clarification. Another problem is that thereare numerous counter examples: in the question-answer pair Who did you see? Yourmother, the mother is known to both of the speakers, but is nevertheless the rheme of theanswer. Reis (1977) has demonstrated that theme-rheme cannot be equated withpresupposition-assertion. Furthermore, the unclear concept given/new informationcannot be clarified with the feature [+previously mentioned], e.g. Numerous journalistsmanaged to get into the courtroom. The judge pointed out to the journalists that… Inspite of the previous mention in the first utterance, journalists is a part of the rheme in thesecond utterance, because this NP is embedded in another predication in the secondutterance, and a themerheme analysis can only be made when consideration is given tothe syntactic and semantic relations of an utterance. The problem posed by relationalexpressions (especially verbs) has led to the controversial assumption that theme-rhemestructure should not be seen as binary but rather as scalar with degrees of commu-nicativedynamism (see Firbas 1964): the theme has the smallest and the rheme the highest degreeof communicative dynamism, because the rheme promotes the communicative processthe most. The verb is usually in the transitional zone between these two poles.Formally, word order and stress (Hammond 1988) indicate which elements arefunctioning as the theme or the rheme of an utterance. In many languages either the leftor the right periphery of a sentence is the preferred place for the rheme, such as intopicalization, left vs right dislocation, and cleft sentences, in English. The nuclear (i.e.main) sentence stress is placed within the rheme (as a universal law, see Gundel 1988;Harlig and Bardovi-Harlig 1988).More recently, research on theme vs rheme has focused on universal laws for markingtheme vs rheme (see the contributions in Hammond 1988), on how theme-rheme can beapplied to other sentence types such as interrogatives and imperatives (see von Stechow,1980), as well as on the relationship between theme-rheme and focusing particles.2 Structure of utterance with regard to sentence topic (what is being talked about) andcomment (what is being said about it) ( topic vs comment).The usages in 1 and 2 are often not sufficiently distinguished from each other in theresearch, resulting in numerous cases of terminological confusion which are furtherenhanced by the various definitional criteria. Thus for ‘theme’ we find the terms ‘topic,’‘background,’ ‘presupposition,’ and for ‘rheme,’ ‘comment,’ ‘focus,’ ‘pre dication’ (invarious combinations).ReferencesAbraham, W., and S.de Meij (eds) 1986. Topic, focus, and configurationality. Amsterdam.Chafe, W. 1976. Givenness, contrastiveness, definite-ness, subjects. topics and point of view. InC.N.Li (ed.), Subject and topic. New York. 25–56.Dahl, Ö. (ed.) 1974. Topic and comment, contextual boundness and focus. Hamburg.Daneš, F. 1974. Functional sentence perspective and the organization of the text. In F.Daneš and J.Firbas (eds). Papers on functional sentence perspective. The Hague. 106–28.Daneš, F. and J.Firbas (eds) 1974. Papers on functional sentence perspective. The Hague.Firbas, J. 1964. On defining the theme in functional sentence analysis. TLP 1.267–80.