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| The Indefinite Article and the Rheme 195
t o hop into the room. (A. WILSON) The indefinite article before little birdlike elderly woman shows that this phrase is the centre of the sentence: we are told that when the door opened the person who appeared was a little birdlike elderly woman. This meaning is further strengthened by the second indefinite article, the one before neat grey skirt and coat. Since the woman herself is represented as a new element in the situation, obviously the same must be true of her clothes. Now let us replace the first indefinite article by the definite. The text then will be Suddenly the door opened and the little bird-like elderly woman in a neat grey skirt and coat seemed almost to hop into the room. This would mean that the woman had been familiar in advance, and the news communicated in the sentence would be, that she almost hopped into the room. The indefinite article before neat grey skirt and coat would show that the information about her clothes is new, i. e. that she had not always been wearing that particular skirt and coat. This would still be a new bit of information but it would not be the centre of the sentence, because the predicate group seemed almost to hop into the room would still be more prominent than the group in a neat grey skirt and coat. Finally, if we replace the second indefinite article by the definite, too, we get the text Suddenly the door opened and the little birdlike elderly woman in the neat grey skirt and coat seemed almost to hop into the room. This would imply that both the elderly little woman with her birdlike look and her grey skirt and coat had been familiar before: she must have been wearing that skirt and coat always, or at least often enough for the people in the story and the reader to remember it. In this way the whole group the little birdlike elderly woman in the neat grey skirt and coat would be completely separated from the rheme-part of the sentence. This experiment, which might of course be repeated with a number of other sentences, should be sufficient to show the relation between the indefinite article and the rheme, that is, functional sentence perspective. There are also some means of showing that a word or phrase represents the theme in a sentence. Sometimes, as we have just seen, this may be achieved by using the definite article. Indeed the contrast between the two articles can be used for that purpose. But there are other means of pointing out the theme as well. One of them, which includes both grammatical and lexical elements, is a loose parenthesis introduced by the prepositional phrase as for (or as to), while in the main body of the sentence there is bound to be a personal pronoun representing the noun which is the centre of the parenthetical as-for-phrase. This personal pronoun may perform different syntactical functions in the sentence but more often than not it will be the subject. A typical example of this sort of 196 Functional Sentence Perspective c onstruction is the following sentence: As for the others, great numbers of them moved past slowly or rapidly, singly or in groups, carrying bags and parcels, asking for directions, perusing timetables, searching for something familiar like the face of a friend or the name of a particular town cranked up in red and gold... (BUECHNER) After the theme of the sentence has been stated in the prepositional phrase as for the others, the subject of the sentence, great numbers of them, specifies the theme (pointing out the quantitative aspect of the others) and the rest of the sentence, long as it is, represents the rheme, telling, in some detail, whatever the others were busy doing at the time. Sometimes a word or phrase may be placed in the same position, without as for: The manuscript so wonderfully found, so wonderfully accomplishing the morning's prediction, how was it to be accounted for? (J. AUSTEN) Here the first half of the sentence, from the beginning and up to the word prediction, represents the theme of the sentence, while the rest of it represents its rheme. The pronoun it of course replaces the long phrase representing the theme. Here are a few more examples of the word or phrase representing the theme placed at the beginning of the sentence as a loose part of it, no matter what their syntactical function would have been if they had stood at their proper place within the sentence. That laughter — how well he knew il! (HUXLEY) There are two possible ways of interpreting the grammatical structure of this sentence. First let us take it as a simple sentence, which seems on the whole preferable. Then the phrase that laughter must be said to represent the theme of the sentence: it announces what the sentence is going to be about. In the body of the sentence itself it is replaced by the pronoun it, which of course is the object. Another possible view is that the sentence is an asyndetic composite one. In that case the phrase that laughter is a one-member exclamatory clause, and the rest of the sentence is another clause. A somewhat similar case is the following, from the same author: His weaknesses, his absurdities — no one knew them better than he did. Just as in the preceding example, it seems preferable to view the sentence as a simple one, with the words his weaknesses, his absurdities representing the theme. There are two more points to make concerning functional sentence perspective: (1) The theme need not necessarily be something known in advance. In many sentences it is, in fact, something already familiar, as in some of our examples, especially with the definite article. However, that need not always be the case. There are sentences in which the theme, too, is something mentioned for the first time and yet it is not the centre of the predication. It is something about which a statement is to be made. The theme is here the starting The Theme 197 p oint of the sentence, not its conclusion. This will be found to be the case, for example, in the following sentence: Jennie leaned forward and touched him on the knee (A. WILSON) which is the opening sentence of a short story. Nothing in this sentence can be already familiar, as nothing has preceded and the reader does not know either who Jennie is or who "he" is. What are we, then, to say about the theme and the rheme in this sentence? Apparently, there are two ways of dealing with this question. Either we will say that Jennie represents the theme and the rest of the sentence, leaned forward and touched him on the knee its rheme. Or else we will say that there is no theme at all here, that the whole of the sentence represents the rheme, or perhaps that the whole division into theme and rheme cannot be applied here. Though both views are plausible the first seems preferable. We will prefer to say that Jennie represents the theme, and emphasise that the theme in this case is not something already familiar but the starting point of the sentence. The same may be said of most sentences opening a text. Let us for instance consider the opening sentence of E. M. Forster's "A Passage to India": Except for the Malabar Caves — and they are twenty miles off — the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. Leaving aside the prepositional phrase except for the Malabar Caves and the parenthetical clause and they are twenty miles off, the main body of the sentence may be taken either as containing a theme: the city of Chandrapore, and a rheme — presents nothing extraordinary, or it might be taken as a unit not admitting of a division into theme and rheme. The first view seems preferable, as it was in the preceding example. Similar observations might of course be made when analysing actual everyday speech. (2) Many questions concerning functional sentence perspective have not been solved yet and further investigation is required. It is by no means certain that every sentence can be divided into two clear-cut parts representing the theme and the rheme respectively. In many cases there are probably intermediate elements, not belonging unequivocally to this or that part, though perhaps tending rather one way or another. J. Firbas in his analysis of English functional sentence perspective has very subtly pointed out these intermediate elements and described their function from this viewpoint. 1 The problem of functional sentence perspective, which appears to be one of the essential problems of modern linguistic study, requires further careful investigation before a complete theory of all phenomena belonging to this sphere can be worked out. The main principles and starting points have, however, been clarified to a degree sufficient to make such future studies fruitful and promising. 1 See J. Firbas, ibid. |