التحليل السياقي لنبر الافعال
Rasheed Al-Jarrah, Language Center, Yarmouk University, Irbid, Jordan.
Abstract
The tradition of the theory of information structure has focused upon one of the phrasal constituents, namely noun phrases. Prince (1981b: 235), for instance, argues in favor of dividing any text into three main components, namely: “DISCOURSE ENTITIES, ATTRIBUTES, and LINKS” (capitals in original), in which “all discourse entities,” which are mainly the potential carriers of information, “are represented by NPs”. The other parts of speech have almost been totally excluded from the investigation for no reasons other than unclarity and fuzziness of the subject matter (Finegan 1994: 206). This paper tries to investigate why the verb, in particular, fails to be the most prominent constituent in the discourse. Within the framework of this paper, it is argued that unlike verbal constituents, nominal constituents exhibit ‘inherent properties’, such as its definiteness and referentiality, which mark their information structure apart from the context (Finegan 1994: 206). At the discourse level, reference and word order contribute as well to this state of affairs. However, the information structure of the verb is, due to uncertainty of its definiteness status (Masica: 1986: 130), only determined by the context in which it occurs, and so it is stressed most of the time contrastively. Even when dividing the sentence, for example, into a ‘theme’ and a ‘rheme’ (Mathesius 1975), the verb is usually regarded as part of the rheme in which the noun phrase following it plays the highest degree of ‘communicative dynamism’ (Firbas 1966: 270), and thus, gets more prominence. Our argument will make clear that it is never unusual for the verb to communicate the highest degree of communicative dynamism, and thus occupies the focal position in the discourse. If this is true, we then provide a uniform analysis where the same argument is applicable to both nominal and verbal constituents.