Interpretacja "w czasie rzeczywistym": struktura tematyczno-rematyczna a teoria relewancji

• Authors: Sax Daniel J.

Title variants

EN

The Thematic-Rhematic Structure of Polish utterances from the perspective of "online" interpretation and Relevance Theory

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

The paper examines the relationship between the abstractly understood Thematic-Rhematic Structure (TRS) of utterances, a theoretical approach initiated by Bogusławski (1977), and the "online" processing and interpretation of utterances in real time by the hearer. Focusin on three Polish examples, we propose a more dynamic approach to TRS based on ideas from Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995), and redefine the notions "theme" and "rheme" in dynamic terms, from hearer's perspective. We present a formalis for modeling how the multi-level nature of TRS emerges out of real-time processing mechanisms: different theme-rheme divisions may arise at different (earlier or later) stages of processing. A main claim is that presuppositional and stylistic effects related to the flexibility of sentence stress position and word order in Polish can be explained well in such a dynamic model. On the sub-utterance level, both stress position and word order ("exponents" of TSR) serve to guide the hearer's investment of effort into positing and verifying hypotheses about the explicit and implicit content of the utterance as a whole, while processing by the hearer is still underway.

Keywords

EN

Thematic-Rhematic Structure; Relevance Theory; language processing; sentence stress; word order

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika w Toruniu. Wydawnictwo UMK
• Journal: Linguistica Copernicana
• Year: 2012
• Issue: 2(8)
• Pages: 173-203

Contributors

author

Sax Daniel J.

• Szkoła Wyższa Psychologii Społecznej, Instytut Filologii Angielskiej