Predication

Text 3

Discuss the text in class.

Present a summary of the text.

Summarize each paragraph from the text in one or two sentences.

Use the vocabulary practiced in tasks 1 and 3 to make up situations of your own.

10. Express your opinion of the content and expression–plane of the text.

A sentence (or "utterance") is a unit of communication. It follows that side by side with its formal grammatical segmentation into formal grammatical parts — such as subject, predicate, the secondary parts of the sentence — there is always the distinction between something already known to the communicating parties, something to be used as its starting point, and that part of the utterance which conveys information proper, and is the unit of dynamic communication.

The two are usually distinguished in terms of the "actual division of the sentence" or functional sentence perspective as the theme and the rheme. The theme is that part of the utterance which is given or "implied" by the context of situation. It is always, so to speak, backward looking, oriented towards the previous part of the text. The rheme "looks ahead". It is the dynamic part of the sentence, conveying as it does the most important part of the information. It "develops" the utterance.

It follows that the sentence normally falls into two parts: that which is assumed known and that which conveys the "information proper". Recent investigation in the field has shown that there is no direct con­nection between the theme-rheme relationship within the sentence and its formal grammatical arrangement. True, there are many instances where the division of the sentence into the group of the subject and the group of the predicate coincides with its division into the theme and the rheme. But this is by no means always the case. A few examples:

Mr. Collins was not a sensible man and the deficiency of nature had I been but little assisted by education or society. The subjection in which his father had brought him up had given him originally great humility of man­ner (Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice).

In this extract the formal division invariably coincides with the dy­namic or the actual division of the sentences. Mr. Collins is the "subject" in the first sentence and also its "theme". (It was chosen as the starting point in the "perspective" because Mr. Collins had already been intro­duced to the reader.) Was not a sensible man is both the predicate and the "rheme".

There is a contradictory relationship between the grammatical and the dynamic analyses of a sentence. On the level of parts-of-the-sentence analysis, the predicative bond serves to establish and express the relationship between the grammatical subject and predicate, called the "principal parts of the sentence". On the level of dynamic syntax, it is the predicating bond that is at the heart of the matter. It serves to express predication — refer the content of a given utterance to reality. It achieves and presents the actual division of the sentence, dividing, as it does, the theme from the rheme. Terminologically the two levels (or approaches) are best de­scribed as the grammatical subject and grammatical predicate on the one hand, and lexical subject and lexical predicate — on the other. The theme-rheme (lexical subject / lexical predicate) arrangement of the sentence does not always coincide with the grammatical division.

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