| Abstract | SUMMARY
The issue of Word Order Change (WOC) which refers to the unusual/marked ordering of sentence constituents, has a long history dated back at least to the German and French typologists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, the heyday of word order typologies in the sixties and seventies of this century has brought into existence a mass of cross-linguistic word order classifications. Most prominent of these are Greenberg’s pioneering work (1963), Lehman’s (1973), (1976), Vennemann’s (1974) and Keenan’s (1979), and most recently, Siewierska’s (1988), Hawkins’ (1990), Dryer’s (1991) and Steele’s (1995).
The problem with these typologies is that they leave a residue of word order facts unaccounted for. For example, they do not take into account the pragmatic considerations controlling the occurrence of a given word order in a given context. And more specifically, they leave unresolved the following question:
Why do languages display multiple structures expressing the same proposition? In other words, why do WOC phenomena exist in natural languages?
Answering the above question has not been among such typologists’ concern, probably due to the large number of languages on which they worked.
Reacting to the view of meaning as the weak point of linguistics advocated by Structuralists and Descriptivists, the Prague School linguists concern themselves with the issues of function and meaning by setting them in the center of their linguistic research. Among their major concerns has been the issue of WOC. They fundamentally tackle WOC within the context of two interrelated concepts: theme/rheme and communicative dynamism (CD). The theme is the initial constituent and usually has the least CD, while the rheme is the rest of the clause/utterance and has the highest CD. To Prague School Linguists, this pattern is unmarked. It can be changed due to the effect of other pragmatic considerations such as theme progression, relative informational status of constituents, the shared presuppositional pool, the development of discourse and the presence of other competing themes.
Highly influenced by the ideas of The Prague School, Halliday develops a somewhat similar model. He adopts, though in a different sense, the Pargean well-known dichotomies: theme/rheme and new/old information. To Halliday, the word order of a given sentence/utterance involves two basic textual components: theme and rheme. Theme “is the point of departure”, rheme is that “of completion”. Halliday’s approach seems more advantageous, as it gives rise to the notion of marked theme which does not necessarily coincided with grammatical subject. In Halliday’s terms, the marked theme might be grammatically realised by other thematized constituents on the condition that they must involve an ideational element. It follows that thematic objects, thematic complements and adjuncts are possible marked themes. Although, the effect of pragmatic considerations on the organization of theme-rheme is not made explicit in the Hallidayan model, he repeatedly makes it clear that language is not practised in abstraction but in association with the communication of individuals in particular situations. It is to satisfy the individuals’ communicative needs that language tends to tailor its grammar. Tailoring grammatical structures, implies the occurrence of constructions with WOC forms.
Since the seventies of this century, contemporary linguists have increasingly advocated functionally oriented-grammars, both in reaction to transformational-generative model, and as a continuation of the well-established older functional trends represented in The Prague School of Linguistics and the Hallidayan systemic theory. They make a significant contribution to the study of WOC forms, by means of integrating them in a general study of information structure. Among the concepts they propose are information packaging (Chafe, 1976), tailoring information (Prince, 1981) and most recently informatics (Vallduvi, 1990) and Lambrecht, 1994). The common stance shared among these linguists is that certain formal properties of sentence, including WOC forms, cannot be fully understood without looking at the linguistic and extralinguistic contexts in which these sentences occur.
Falling within that functional domain, and adopting the Hallidayan model, the present study aims at investigating WOC forms and functions in Spoken English (SE) and Colloquial Egyptian Arabic (CEA) with a view to seeing similarities and differences between the two varieties. It is noted that, most work on WOC forms in Arabic though under different headings, has been devoted to Written Standard Arabic (e.g. Kamel, 1982; Al-Sweel, 1983; Aziz, 1988 and El-Wahy, 1990, 1997). By contrast, little attention has been paid to studying WOC in spoken varieties. It is hoped that the present study would make a contribution towards a better understanding of the WOC issue.
The data corpus was drawn from the following sources:
a. An eight-hour recording of naturally-occurring conversations in each variety.
b. Films, serials and conversations recorded from radio and TV which contain dialogues in SE and CEA.
c. Course books which contain dialogues in English.
After transcribing the data, WOC forms were identified. They were examined within the context in which they occur. For illustrative purposes, lengthy conversational extracts were cited in chapters three and four.
The study falls into five chapters:
Chapter one is an introduction. It provides a brief account of the functional approaches from the late 20s until now, elucidating their close relationship to pragmatics as both investigate language in use. The chapter also outlines Halliday’s account of spoken language in terms of its grammar, medium and function. It also provides a brief survey of the previous studies on WOC in Standard Arabic. The chapter concludes with a definition of terms used such as WOC, form and function, SE and CEA and contrastive linguistics.
Chapter two is divided into three sections. Section one discusses some typological preliminaries, ending with the typological status of the two varieties under consideration. Section two reviews the various grammatical treatments of the issue of WOC, involving those of the traditional, the structural, the transformational, The Prague School and The Hallidayan grammars. This section also provides a discussion of the Hallidayan model in general and the notion of marked theme and its realization in particular. Section three casts light on the pragmatic considerations controlling the occurrence of WOC forms. One of these is that of information structure. The chapter traces its historical development and its recent implication. The discussion also extends to embrace other pertinent factors such as context of situation, intonation, presupposition and inference.
Chapter three provides a taxonomy of WOC forms and functions in SE. To this end, the theoretical preliminaries discussed in the preceding chapters are practically applied. In identifying WOC forms the notion of marked theme in Hallidayan grammar is employed. To figure out the possible WOC function, the analysis draws on the pragmatic factors discussed earlier.
Chapter four proposes a further taxonomy of WOC forms and functions in CEA. It opens with an account of some grammatical and morphological properties of CEA.
Chapter five is a conclusion. In this chapter, SE and CEA are juxtaposed for contrast, with a view to identifying what they have in common and how they differ with regard to WOC forms and functions. The chapter provides and discusses the findings obtained which could be summarized as follows:
1. Though genetically distinct, SE and CEA are typologically identical, both are SVO languages.
2. Being polysynthetic, CEA is more motivated by pragmatic considerations than SE.
3. The principle of newsworthiness seems to be the controlling factor in arranging constituents in CEA sentences. It has been noted that the most newsworthy constituents appear first. On the contrary, the least newsworthy ones appear last.
4. The two languages are syntatically based. Yet SE displays rigid word ordering, unlike CEA which motivates more pragmatic reordering than SE.
5. A major difference between the two varieties lies in the fact that WOC forms in SE primarily observe the end-focus principle, while those of CEA conform to the beginning focus principle.
6. A further difference between the two varieties is realized in the fact that CEA sentence constituents enjoy considerable mobility. The subject, for instance, may appear initially, finally and medially. The object may occur either initially or immediately after a themetized verb. The verb normally appears after the subject unless it is thematized. The verb never appears last in a transitive clause. Direct and indirect objects are arranged according to their degree of newsworthiness. The same principle applies to the ordering of the object and object complement, and the first and second appositives. By contrast, SE usually shows a relatively fixed ordering of constituents.
It has been found that two varieties function the same with regard to discourse management and interaction techniques.
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