წინადადების საინფორმაციო სტრუქტურა და სიტყვათა რიგი არაბულში

Abstract

Linguistic structuring of reality based on the notions ‘same-different’ proceeds through ‘oppositions’. An opposition means that there are at least two items one of which is ‘marked’ and another is ‘unmarked’. Structuring of the information, its packaging, also proceeds through oppositions where one part of the information stands out against a background of the other part of information. From the communicational, pragmatic point of view, this information is highlighted, important and represents the foregrounding of a certain part of information. Any kind of ‘foregrounding’ (resp. ‘highlighting’, ‘logical emphasis’, ‘promotion’, ‘standing out as the first, important’, etc.) could be regarded as one, common phenomenon which represents the main strategy of linguistic structuring of information. From this point of view, Topic, Focus, Subject, Theme, Point of view and so on – are the same as far as they represent various forms of ‘foregrounding’. Arabic is a language with relatively extensive case and agreement marking. Consequently, it allows for variations on its unmarked word order, which is SVO. In fact, all six permutations of the basic sentence constituents Subject, Verb, and Object are documented in Arabic written or oral texts. Moreover, all ‘marked’ variations in word order relate to each other, as each one denotes some aspect of the information structure of the language, either topicalizing or focusing (resp. foregrounding in the common, wide sense) a constituent. In Arabic, the definite morphosyntactic structures represent either Subject or Object foregrounding and the following cognitive processes can explain their appearance: depending on a specific situation, it becomes necessary to emphasize mainly unmarked Subject or marked O, to change their common prototype role and to assign to them a specific, peculiar character. This peculiarity – the cognitive markedness of these nouns – is represented on the grammatical level by the formal markedness (that is, by changing of their canonical cases): Subject appears in accusative instead of Nominative, whereas Object appears in Nominative instead of its canonical form – Accusative. As a result, undifferentiated constructions of nouns arise: in the case of foregrounding of the Subject, both S and O stand in the Accusative case, and in the case of foregrounding of the Object, both S and O appear in the Nominative case. Examples: kataba rağulun risālatan. Wrote man+NOM letter+ACC The man wrote a letter. ʼinna rağulan kataba risālatan. PTC(indeed) man+ACC wrote letter+ACC Indeed, the man wrote a letter. risālatun kataba-ha rağulun. letter+NOM wrote-it man+NOM The letter, the man wrote it. The (1)-sentence shows unmarked word order, while (2)-example expresses Subject foregrounding and (3), consequently, Object foregrounding. These structures reflect the following state of matters: as a result of the coincidence of the two categorical meanings (resp. S/O and Foregrounding), the functions of nouns have become equal, although the information about their categorical meanings is preserved and ‘Syntactic Functions (resp. S and O)’ and ‘Foregrounding’ both are formally distinguished: FOREGROUNDING – fronting of foregrounded function in the verb prior position and rising of undifferentiated morphosyntactic patterns. SUBJECT – fixation of its position after ʼinna (or the particles of its group). OBJECT – the appearance of the respective pronoun suffix in the canonical position of the Object in a sentence. There are several possibilities to express the foregrounding of main syntactic functions, and we assume that these specific constructions, organized hierarchically, reflect the different degrees of foregrounding and can be clarified employing the following cognitive interpretation: the higher the complexity of formal devices the higher the degree of foregrounding.