Quality bearers, phenomena, and referential importance: A comparative study
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | This study aims at finding a correlation between the Firbasian phenomenon occurring on the scene and the quality bearer on the one hand, and the idea of referential importance as developed by Wallace Chafe on the other. The expected result is that the more a referent is important in the flow of communication, the smaller the proportion of phenomena will be. Phenomenon functions as a rheme in a sentence, sometimes even as the rheme proper; quality bearer is a theme and can be either context dependent or context independent. This will be compared to Chafe’s referential importance. In his theory of communication flow, he proposed the idea of the light subject constraint. It presupposes that, in general, subjects are only lightly loaded with information, in Firbasian terms, have low communicative dynamism. To deal with instances where subjects are newly introduced onto the scene, he proposed the idea of referential importance. Chafe divided subjects into three groups: primary, secondary and trivial. Primary subject-referents are those that are the most vital for a text, for the development of a story; as such, they occur relatively frequently. On the other hand, trivial referents are merely fleeting mentions and their frequency of mention is relatively low. Because, overall, trivial referents are unimportant for the development of the entire communicative event, Chafe concluded that even in cases where in a sentence/clause/distributional field the subject functions as a rheme, the light subject constraint holds. In this study, the subjects of basic distributional fields were analysed from the viewpoint of FSP. The same subjects were then assigned their referential importance status based on their frequency of occurrence. Finally, the proportions of phenomena, context independent quality bearers and context dependent quality bearers to the three levels of referential importance were calculated and the results compared to the original hypothesis. |
| Related projects: |