Subject, Theme and Agent in Modern Standard Arabic

Hussein Abdul-Raof

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136107542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Investigates the universal categories 'subject', 'theme', and 'agent' with special reference to their functional status in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and how these three distinct functions may or may not coincide in Arabic sentences. These functions are inexplicitly characterised by classical and modern Arab linguists and Arabists alike.
It has been found that the pre- (viz. sentence - initial) or post-verbal noun phrase (NP) in Arabic can be assigned the syntactic function 'subject' but may not necessarily assume the semantic function 'agent', that the pre-verbal NP, which may not necessarily be the 'subject', has the pragmatic function 'theme', and that these distinct functions sometimes cluster around a single NP in certain sentences, depending on genre.
It has also been found that in MSA the order of sentence constituents is relatively free, subject to a verb-initial preference, especially when needed to prevent ambiguity.
The present study reveals the fact that although coding features such as word order, case marking, and cross-referencing (viz. agreement) may provide a clear indication of which NPs are 'subjects' in MSA, they do not provide a clear-cut indication of semantic relations such as 'agent'; the 'subject' position in MSA is not necessarily the canonical 'agent' position.

1	Introduction

This chapter outlines the objective of the present study and the data used throughout our analysis.

1.1 OBJECTIVE OF OUR STUDY

The universal categories ‘subject’, ‘theme’, and ‘agent’ and their interaction in certain languages have attracted great interest from a number of linguists. The studies edited by Li (1976) provide a valuable contribution to the analysis of these universal categories. From these studies, an obvious conclusion one can draw, in the view of Li (Ibid. : ix), is that there is no universal definition, i.e. discovery procedure, by which one can identify either a subject or a topic (theme) in a language; and yet the fact that such terms are used quasi-universally by grammarians and linguists suggests that there must be something that all ‘subjects’ have in common, whatever the language, just as all ‘agents’ and ‘themes’ (or ‘topics’) must have something in common. “The concept of subject is certainly one of the oldest in the Western tradition of grammatical relationship. In fact, it is not simply a concept in grammar; it has been fundamental in Western philosophy and logic since antiquity” (Kuroda 1976 : 1). “Since Plato the notion of subject has figured prominently in grammatical theory” (Foley and van Valin (1977 : 293). Arab grammarians have also dealt with it. Their linguistic analysis, according to Versteegh (1993 : 25), shows the influence of Greek linguistic tradition. The Arabs became acquainted with Hellenistic culture and scholarship. They were able to borrow some of the elements of Greek grammatical teaching, without thereby taking over the entire system (Ibid. : 191ff). However, one should not be misled by other exagerated claims made by some Western scholars such as Versteegh (1977) about the Greek influence on Arab grammarians (cf. Fleisch 1994). Recently, the notion of subject has again become an issue in linguistic theory (Foley and van Valin 1977 : 293). Keenan (1976) has attempted to provide an exhaustive and systematised set of the properties of subjects in any language. Thus a subject in any language can be understood, according to Li (Ibid.), as the combination of a subset of Keenan’s subject properties. The elucidation of the properties of subjects naturally clarifies their roles in the structure of language since subject is basically a relational notion denoting the grammatical function performed in a sentence by a particular constituent of the sentence. Any discussion of subjects will inevitably involve the syntactic structure of sentences. This is attested by the fact that the majority of the properties of subjects listed by Keenan (1976) are syntactic in nature. According to Li and Thompson (1976 : 459), the notion of subject has long been considered a basic grammatical relation in the sentential structure of a language. In the view of Foley and van Valin (1977 : 293), Keenan (1976) is an attempt to provide a methodology by which one can identify that noun phrase which functions as a subject within the grammatical system of a language. It is an attempt to do this for the ‘basic’ sentence in a language. Keenan (1976) proposes 30-odd properties which he claims can be used to identify the subject noun phrase, if any, in a basic sentence in any given language. However, Foley and van Valin (Ibid.) claim that there are no universal defining characteristics of ‘subject’.

Unlike the notion of ‘subject’, the notion of ‘theme’, also called ‘topic’, is discourse oriented, and it appears to be much more elusive than that of ‘subject’ (Li 1976 : x). It is to the Prague School, according to Lyons (1977,2 : 506), that we are indebted for the terms ‘theme’ and ‘rheme’.

‘Theme’ implies ‘rheme’ and has long been characterised notionally as “what a sentence is about” (Hockett 1958; Werth 1984), while ‘rheme’, a term which, in the view of Lyons (1977, 2 : 507), goes back to the Greek word “rhema” (“what is said”), has been characterised as “what is said about the theme”. Other linguists have preferred to restrict themselves to a structural definition in terms of “initial element” (Quirk et al 1972; Halliday 1970) or, for linguists adhering to a transformational account, of “extraposed” (Longacker 1974) or “left-dislocated” element (Gundel 1974).

In MSA, as in Chinese (Barry 1975 : 7), the ‘theme’ is sentence initial. In some Arabic structures, as in Russian (Nichols et al 1980 : 373), the ‘subject’ is the ‘theme’ and ‘object’ is part of the ‘rheme’. However, in other structures the ‘subject’ can be dethematized, and ‘object’ can be placed sentence-initially as a ‘theme’.

Firbas (1966), Halliday (1967), Gundel (1974), Li and Thompson (1976), Givon (1976), Foley and van Valin (1984), etc., are some of the linguists who have seriously attempted to characterise the notion of ‘theme’ in different languages. Generally, ‘theme’ is defined as what the rest of the sentence is about. The ‘theme-rheme’ distinction is independent of the grammatical organisation of the sentence (Halliday 1967 : 200). Firbas equates ‘theme’ with ‘given’ or context-dependent elements.

The ‘theme-rheme’ constructions have been referred to as left-dislocations by some linguists such as Foley and van Valin (1984 : 124, 1985 : 299), Barnes (1985;cf. Bazzanella 1987), etc. Left-dislocation, according to Keenan and Schieffelin (1976 : 240), represents a transformation that moves an NP within the sentence. These linguists argue that in order for such constructions to be appreciated, we have to examine them in their context of use. This involves first familiarising the reader with the discourse contexts in which such utterances are employed. A critical factor is the need of the speaker to provide appropriate old information, i.e., old information relevant to the main point expressed about the referent...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abstract
• Acknowledgement
• Chapter One – Introduction
• Chapter Two – Subject in Arabic
• Chapter Three – ]Theme-Rheme in Arabic
• Chapter Four – Agent in Arabic
• Chapter Five – Interaction of Subject, Theme and Agent
• References
• Index