Given that rhetoric – the THEME system of the grammar – is concerned with all the resources available to a communicator for distributing information in a text and focusing on selected parts of it, it is clearly impracticable to think of providing examples for all options, even for a single pair of languages; that would constitute a major work in itself. We shall therefore limit ourselves to a single issue, markedness, and a single pair of languages, English and French.
Consider the possible renderings into French of the proposition realized by the English clause:
I saw a white horse.
(1) J'ai vu un cheval blanc.
(2) C'est moi qui a vu un cheval blanc.
(3) Mais j'ai bien vu un cheval blanc.
(4) C'est un cheval blanc que j'ai vu.
We might try literal translations of each of these into English; a process of‘back translation'.
(1) I saw a white horse.
(2) It's me/It is I that saw a white horse.
(3) But I well saw a white horse.
(4) It is/was a white horse that I saw.
Clearly there are degrees of acceptability being reflected here.
(1) is isomorphic and, presumably, unmarked in both languages and, hence, part of the FSS for both and a clause which would move through the syntactic processor at high speed whether being analysed or synthesized.
(2) is possible (i.e. grammatical) but has an awkward ring to it, which signals unacceptability for a native user of English. One would feel more comfortable focusing on the Actor with an English clause with a predicated theme and a 'pseudo-cleft' of the type:
The one who saw a white horse was me
rather than the predicated theme with a 'cleft sentence' selected by French.
(3) is not possible, as it stands (i.e. it is ungrammatical), since the information focus is on the truth of the assertion and would be more naturally rendered by some clause such as
I really did see a white horse
in which case we are dealing with modality (see 4.(3) or, alternatively, a version could be constructed which focused on the process;
Saw a white horse, (that's what) I did
but one suspects that that is not the focus of the original.
(4) again an isomorphism between two marked forms in both the languages; focus on the Goal of the process through fronting and predicating with a 'cleft';
It is/was a white horse that I saw
It is revealing how even two closely related languages should still diverge in their choice of options in THEME. How much greater might we expect the differences to be between more distant languages and cultures.
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