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Chapter XXV
FUNCTIONAL SENTENCE PERSPECTIVE
In studying the structure of a sentence, we are faced with a problem which has been receiving ever greater attention in linguistic investigations of recent years. This is the problem of dividing a sen-tenсe into two sections, one of them containing that which is the starting point of the statement, and the other the new information for whose sake the sentence has been uttered or written. This has been termed "functional perspective". We will illustrate it by a pimple example. Let us take this sentence from a contemporary novel: I made the trip out here for curiosity, just to see where you were intending to go. (M. MITCHELL) Here the words I made the trip out here are the starting point, and the rest of the sentence (for ... go) contains the new information. It cannot be said that every sentence must necessarily consist of two such sections. Some sentences (especially one-member sentences) cannot be divided up in this way, and doubts are also possible about some other types. However, most sentences do consist of these two sections and the relation between the syntactic structure of the sentence and its division into those two sections presents a linguistic problem deserving our attention.
Before we go on to study the problem it will be well to establish the terms which we will use to denote the sections of a sentence from this viewpoint.
There have been several pairs of terms proposed for this purpose, such as "psychological subject" and "psychological predicate", "lexical subject" and "lexical predicate", "semantic subject" and "semantic predicate", and others. Some of these are distinctly unacceptable, as they either suggest a wrong view of the phenomena in question, or are incompatible with our general principles for analysing language phenomena.
Thus, the terms "psychological subject" and "psychological predicate", proposed by the German scholar H. Paul, 1 obviously will not do, as they introduce a notion of individual psychology, which lies beyond the sphere of linguistic investigation: the question we are discussing is not, what individual interpretation an individual reader or hearer may give to a sentence but what is objectively expressed in it, independently of a hearer's personal views or tastes.
The terms "lexical subject" and "lexical predicate", proposed by Prof. A. Smirnitsky,2 will not do either, because they appear to take the whole problem out of the sphere of syntactic study and to include it into that of lexicology, which, however, has nothing to
1 See H. Paul, Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, 5. Aufl., 1937, S. 124.
2 See А. И. Смирницкий, Синтаксис английского языка, стр. 110.
192 Functional Sentence Perspective
d o with it. We are not going to analyse the lexical meanings of individual words, which are treated in lexicology, but the function of a word or word group within a sentence expressing a certain thought; their function, that is, in expressing either what is already assumed or what is new in the sentence uttered.
We would rather avoid all terms built on the principle of combining the already existing terms "subject" and "predicate" with some limiting epithets, and use a pair of terms which have not yet been used to express any other kind of notion.
The pair of terms best suited for this purpose would seem to be "theme" and "rheme", which came into use lately, particularly in the works of several Czech linguists, who have specially studied the problem, notably with reference to the English language, both from the modern and from the historic viewpoint. Among the Czech scholars who have widely used these terms we should first of all mention Jan Firbas, who has developed a theory of his own on the historical development of the English language in this sphere.1
The terms "theme" and "rheme" are both derived from Greek, and are parallel to each other. The term "theme" comes from the Greek root the- 'to set', or 'establish', and means 'that which is set or established'. The term "rheme" is derived from the root rhe -'to say', or 'tell', and means 'that which is said or told' (about that which was set or established beforehand). These terms are also convenient because adjectives are easily derived from them: "thematic" and "rhematic", respectively.
What, then, are the grammatical means in Modern English which can be used to characterise a word or word group as thematic, or as rhematic? We should note in passing, however, that it will hardly be possible to completely isolate the grammatical from the lexical means, and we shall have to discuss some phenomena which belong to lexicology rather than grammar, pointing out in each case that we are doing so.
The means of expressing a thematic or a rhematic quality of a word or phrase in a sentence to a great extent depend on the grammatical structure of the given language and must differ considerably, according to that structure.
Thus, in a language with a widely developed morphological system and free word order, word Order can be extensively used to show the difference between theme and rheme. For instance, word order plays an important part from this viewpoint in Russian. Without going into particulars, we may merely point out the difference between two such sentences as Старик вошел and Вошел
1 See J. Firbas, Some Thoughts on the Function of Word-Order in Old English and Modern English. Sbornik prací filosofické fakulty brnenské university, 1959,
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