The use of the grammatical category of indefiniteness for the pre-positional subject-rheme identification

The subject of the research isthe construction with the pre-positional rhematic subject in English scientific and technical literature. The research is of both theoreticaland practical value. Theoretically the presence of the subject-rheme in the position before the syntactical predicate in the emotionallyneutral discourse does not correspond to the accepted idea of the universal character of the progressive, theme - rheme (topic - focus)utterance organization and is also at variance with the Prague Linguistic School Theory of the Functional Sentence Perspective. Thegiven research is of practical importance for the English - Russian translation practice because due to the Russian scientific style standardthe equivalent of the pre-positional English rheme is supposed to be shifted to the Russian final sentence position. The given bilingualspecific character of the English prepositional rhematic subject makes the task of its monolingual identification criteria search inEnglish especially acute. In English of a wide variety of the monolingual rheme markers the Indefinite Article marker is the most disputableone. Attempts are being made to correlate the logical category of the subject-rheme with the grammatical category of the Indefiniteness.The research made makes the righteousness of this approach, described in linguistic literature, rather doubtful. In the structuresanalysed the Indefinite Article is met in the least number of cases (22,2%) in comparison with the Definite Article (30,8%) and the Zeroone (47%). An opinion is expressed that the grammatical category of Indefiniteness, responsible for the choice of the English Article,does not correlate with the communicative category - rheme, and, consequently, cannot serve as the decisive criterion for its identification.In the Language of Science and Technology any definite object known from the consituation (context and situation) can serve asthe rheme. Hence, the rheme of the utterance is not an object that is new and indefinite, but an object that is important from thespeakers point of view at the very moment of speech. To a great extend in Scientific and Technical Literature the rheme of the utteranceis defined by the objective course of the described scientific research and the pragmatic orientation of the author, choosing the correspondingspeech strategy. Instead of the Indefiniteness category the rheme of the utterance is contributed by the semantics of the constitutinglexical units, comprising the meanings of plurality, generalization, exclusiveness, importance etc. A significant part of the sentencesanalysed acquire the context independent autosemantic character possessing peculiar genre specific features of the scientific style.

Keywords

Authors

References