Re: Results of Poll by Email No. 27

En réponse à Christian Thalmann <cinga@...>:

>
> Maybe the predicate should be considered the most important part of a
> regular sentence then.
>
I don't think you can discuss the most important part of a sentence in terms
of "subject" and "predicate" which are after all syntactic notions, while the
notion of "importance" is rather semantic. To discuss the "importance" of
something, I think we must discuss in terms of "theme and rheme" or "topic and
comment". The theme or topic is "what we talk about", and the rheme or comment
is "what we have to say about it". Under this analysis, it comes that *by
definition*, a sentence (or rather an "utterance", which is probably a better
equivalent to João's "oração") always has at least a rheme, and that a full
sentence cannot exist without a rheme. On the other hand, the theme can be
absent, since it can be inferred by context (also, being "what we talk about",
the theme is often already known, and as such needn't be repeated). In
languages which don't overtly mark the topic (Japanese does, with the particle
|wa|), the theme often parallels with the subject and the rheme with the
predicate. Example (best seen with a monospace font):
This man is building the house.
--------|---------------------
Subject |       Predicate
 Theme  |         Rheme

But it's not always necessary. For instance, this same sentence, as answer to
the question "Who is building the house?", has to be analysed this way:
This man is building the house.
--------|---------------------
Subject |       Predicate
 Rheme  |         Theme

In this case, the theme is the predicate! It's easy to convince yourself that
it is so: the theme is the already known information, which does correspond to
the predicate here. Also, it appears that if we want, we can easily reply to
the question by simply saying "this man". Since any complete utterance must at
least have a rheme, and that this utterance *is* complete, it must be a rheme.
The predicate, in this case, has not been repeated without compromising the
completeness of the utterance, and thus is definitely the theme.

Hehe, I think this reply is technical enough that nobody will have understood
anything ;))) . I hope it's clear enough though. I know I can be rather
confusing sometimes.

>
> Then again, bureaucratese must be among the sickest and evillest forms
> of communication ever to plague civilisation.  My parents have been
> trying
> to make sense of a real estate purchase contract in English for weeks,
> and they ask me for help whenever they get too confused...  Usually, I
> end up just as confused as they are.   /=P
>
I have had the same experience with French bureaucratese, and Dutch
bureaucratese seem to be the same :) .

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

It takes a straight mind to create a twisted conlang.