Theme, Rheme, Marking, Fronting etc

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Thu May 26, 2005 1:03 pm

Can anyone point me at some sound web based information on the above and related matters? Pitched somewhere between an idiot's guide and impossible academese? Google throws up too much of the same stuff over and over again to be really useful.

Don't tell me to go out and buy a real book with covers and an index or do any real research, even if that's what I probably should be doing. Amazon have had too much of my wages for the first and I have no time and still less inclination for the second.

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Mon May 30, 2005 12:29 am

I don't know, but let's attempt a discussion based around this short piece....

http://www.ugr.es/~ftsaez/theme.pdf

I still fail to see much utility in looking at things that way, because it won't provide learners with any rules to usefully apply.

If I say "Very nice - that cake we had yesterday" it would seem from this short article that "very nice" is the theme.

That doesn't make any sense to me.

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Mon May 30, 2005 3:08 am

If I say "Very nice - that cake we had yesterday" it would seem from this short article that "very nice" is the theme.

That doesn't make any sense to me.

This is known as arguing from intellectual incapacity.

Though you have at least got the theme perfectly.

I still fail to see much utility in looking at things that way, because it won't provide learners with any rules to usefully apply.

Why on earth is providing learners with rules to usefully apply of any relevance to the argument at all? I very much doubt of eleven-dimensional string theory will provide anybody with any useful rules to apply in life, but are you suggesting that we should scrap teaching physics at school and university?

And if your students are Japanese, and thus have a special word used to set out the theme, they will have a very useful rule to apply.

Theme and rheme go all the way back to the Prague School. I don't have any links for you Juan, because my very limited knowledge comes from paper books. Perhaps the best thing is if each of us posts what we find.

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Mon May 30, 2005 3:48 am

The Japanese topic particle is much the same as the Korean, I believe.

So I doubt its usage will be entirely governed by the rules of theme and rheme. I wish it could be so simple.

Anyways, in my example, is "very nice" the general theme I wish to discuss. Or is it the cake?

Would "That cake we had yesterday was just lovely, mmmmm" be a different kind of beast, theme wise?

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Mon May 30, 2005 6:50 am

I get the impression that "theme" is being used in a specialised sense, to mean "A shared starting point for writer/speaker and reader/listener" see

http://www.uefap.co.uk/writing/parag/par_flow.htm

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Mon May 30, 2005 7:07 am

So fronting is making the theme of a sentence be both already known and at the same time emphatic?

I have never had such wonderful cake (You know who I am AND I want "I" to be in pole position)

Such a wonderful cake have I never had (Starting from the shared view that it is a wonderful cake)

Never.................. (etc)

A wonderful cake such as this have I never had.

Can the question form be taken into account? Am I fronting the "have" to make the theme of the sentence the Yes/No -ness:

"Have I ever had such wonderful cake?"

Very strong the force is in you Luke.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language ... 02173.html

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Mon May 30, 2005 7:26 am

"Such a wonderful cake I have never had"

If someone came out with that, well, it would be very unusual! It would be in order to ultra-emphasize, perhaps. Surely it cannot be a regular theme/rheme matter.

Anyway, are we fronting things due to the tyranny of theme? Or are we passivizing things?

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Mon May 30, 2005 6:11 pm

Theme and rheme apply to all canonical sentences in English I believe. The fact that it is marked off explicitly in Japanese, and according to you in Korean, does suggest it may well be a language universal.

To understand what we mean by the term, and why you use it, we need to look at the confusion that grew up over the nineteenth century when grammarians started looking at the word 'subject' a little more carefully.

You will find in fact that there are three types of 'subject'.

The grammatical subject, or the part of the sentence that governs the verb.
The logical subject which is what is otherwise called the doer or actor, or agent.
The psychological subject or what the message is about.

Rather than talking about three types of 'subject' it is easier to give the three functions three different names.
We reserve subject for the grammatical subject, actor or agent for the logical subject, and theme for the psychological subject.

Let us look at a normal declarative affirmative sentence in the active voice:
Woodcutter doesn't understand functional grammar.
In this sentence all three subjects coincide. 'Woodcutter' is the theme, subject and actor all to himself.

Now, let's look at a normal declarative affirmative sentence in the passive voice:
'Guernica' was painted by Picasso.
Here the subject and theme are both 'Guernica', but the actor or agent, he who did the painting, is Picasso.

And finally in the sentence:
Why was the EU constitution rejected by the French centre-left?
all three functions are separate. The theme is 'why', the subject is 'the EU
Constitution' and the actor/agent is 'The French centre-left'.

Now, why do we have these three separate functions. The answer is of course because a clause can be viewed in three modes and each function corresponds to a particular mode

Theme- Clause as message (what I want to tell you)
Subject- Clause as a symbolic exchange (the symbols that make up a language)
Actor- Clause as representation (the actual events represented by the symbolic language).

Now, none of this is exactly new - it goes back to the Prague school in the twenties and thirties, and predates Systemic-Functional Linguistics by many decades. The trouble with sticking with the Victorians, Woodcutter, is that their concepts are as leaky as their plumbing.

Also all of it is clearly explained by Halliday in Chapter 2 of "An Introduction to Functional Grammar"; I'm simply paraphrasing what he says.

PS

Anyways, in my example, is "very nice" the general theme I wish to discuss. Or is it the cake?

'Very nice' - the NP 'that cake we had yesterday' is the rheme. If you included the NP in the Theme there'd be nothing left to the sentence - it would have got swallowed up like the Cheshire cat was by the smile.

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Mon May 30, 2005 10:34 pm

Well, I sort of gathered that, so what I meant is that

"Very nice - that cake we had yesterday"
and "That cake we had yesterday was just lovely"

Would garner the same kind of response, and therefore I can't see how the theme would be different, in reality (I take it the cake is the official theme the second time around).

What's the definition of 'rheme'? As we saw on the other thread, it isn't always new information. Just "the other stuff"? My link says that MOST sentences have theme and rheme. When do we go without? In examples like my "Turkey has invaded Greece!"?

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Tue May 31, 2005 9:06 am

Doesn't it go something like this:

1 Very nice (focus our minds briefly on on very nice, the idea, we all know what it means, now go on) - that cake we had yesterday

2 Yesterday (yup, Monday, it rained) we had a very nice cake .

3 That cake we had yesterday (what cake? oh THAT cake) was very nice.

Or at its unfronted simplest

4 We (yes, I see, you at least another person) had a very nice cake yesterday.

The thing is that it seems to me that much the same process is required to then take on board "that cake" then "we" in 1 , or the "we" in 2 and 3, not to mention "yesterday" in 3 before proceeding.

It might make sense in terms of onion skins of clauses, though it gets a bit Anglo-Saxon;

Very nice (T) // / was the cake(T) //which we(T) / had yesterday(R)/(R) //(R)///.

A sort of illegitimate son of Immediate Constituent Analysis (which shows how old I am)

Andrew Patterson · Post by **Andrew Patterson** » Tue May 31, 2005 3:09 pm

Stephen wrote:

Theme and rheme apply to all canonical sentences in English I believe. The fact that it is marked off explicitly in Japanese, and according to you in Korean, does suggest it may well be a language universal.

The one exception would be Piraha if it's true what they say about the language. Apparantly the language lacks embedding of any sort. Theme and rheme are, of course, a type of embedding.

Lorikeet · Post by **Lorikeet** » Tue May 31, 2005 4:00 pm

Andrew Patterson wrote:Stephen wrote:
Theme and rheme apply to all canonical sentences in English I believe. The fact that it is marked off explicitly in Japanese, and according to you in Korean, does suggest it may well be a language universal.
The one exception would be Piraha if it's true what they say about the language. Apparantly the language lacks embedding of any sort. Theme and rheme are, of course, a type of embedding.

Heh thanks for the interesting Google sidetrack of "Piraha"

.

Sally Olsen · Post by **Sally Olsen** » Tue May 31, 2005 6:29 pm

I also thought that theme was the old knowledge that we share and the rheme the new information.
The reason that Yoda speaks the way he does is that it is a non-standard variation of this that forces us to concentrate on what he says to interpret it and this makes him seem old and wise.
Rest, I must

In this case, I is the usual theme and must rest the rheme.
In woodcutters case the cake is the usual theme and the rest is the rheme. "Very nice" seems to be a comment that is made separately and then somehow joined with punctuation? We rarely talk this way.
We normally have to give old information to anchor our thoughts so that we can take off on the new information. But if we want to figure out a way to have a little alien talk in English so that he sounds old and wise, we just mix up the normal patterns. They could have let Yoda speak a foreign language and had English subtitles but this way was super effective and is imitated widely by the kids at least.

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Tue May 31, 2005 7:06 pm

Apparantly the language lacks embedding of any sort. Theme and rheme are, of course, a type of embedding.

Explanation please.

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Tue May 31, 2005 7:11 pm

Just starting Chapter 4, so you'll all have to wait for Halliday's pronouncements.

He does say that Theme is often called Topic, but that topic depends on the idea of Given, and it's not exactly the same as Theme.

The rheme is everything else in the sentence apart from the theme.