M. A. K. Halliday

1
M. A. K. Halliday

• Notes on transivity and theme in English (4.2
  4.5)
• Part 2

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4.2 Information Unit

• John saw a movie last night, and then he went
  home.
• Discourse (verbal exchange of ideas) is
  distributed into information units.
• One IU is one tone group.
• Information structure is the result.
• There is no text without IUs.

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4.2 Information Unit

• Where to put commas?
• After 1827, the world had to live without
  Beethoven. phonological punctuation
• After 1827 the world had to live without
  Beethoven. grammatical punctuation

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4.2 Information Unit

• 1. //John saw the play yesterday//
• 2. //John//saw the play yesterday//
• 3. //John//saw the play//yesterday//
• 1. Unmarked. The clause is one IU.
• 2. Marked, with the clause as two IUs.
• 3. Marked, with the clause as three IUs.
• ? The average number of IUs per clause lies
  between one and two.

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4.2 Information Unit

• //John sawlt//or said he was going to see//gtthe
  play yesterday//
• One can enclose a tone group within another one.
• This procedure is called interpolation.

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4.2 Information Unit

• 1. //Mary//always goes to town on Saturdays//
• 2. //Mary//always goes to town on Saturdays//
• Both have two IUs, but the information focus is
  accommodated at different spots.
• What goes first unit or focus?
• Unit always goes first!

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4.3 Information Focus

• //John//saw the play yesterday//
• // two IUs two tone groups

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4.3 Information Focus

• //John//saw the play yesterday//
• Information focus on John, play, and yesterday
• The first tone group has a simple tonic segment
  (John).
• The second tone group has a compound tonic
  segment, that is, it has two tonic segments
  (play, yesterday).

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4.3 Information Focus

• //John//saw the play yesterday//
• Two tonic segments (play, yesterday) primary
  focus on play, secondary focus on yesterday
• //John//saw the/play/yesterday//
• / indicates the foot boundary. Each component
  within the tonic segment consists of at least one
  foot (foot the basic unit of verse metre).

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4.3 Information Focus

• //John//saw the/play/yesterday//
• Bold type indicates the tonic syllable, which is
  the initial syllable in the tonic component.
• The tonic syllable is phonologically prominent.
  This is a matter of pitch movement.

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4.3 Information Focus

• //John//saw the/play/yesterday//
• What is saw the?
• It precedes the tonic segment and is thus called
  pretonic segment.
• It does not have information focus.

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4.3 Information Focus

• Focal information is important, stressed, and
  new.
• What is not new (like saw the) is given.
• //John//saw the/play/yesterday//
• Rule In many English sentences, the stress
  falls on the last accented syllable. Thus, each
  tone group has a new element, realized as tonic,
  and a given element, realized as pretonic.

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4.3 Information Focus

• However, the new element can occur at the
  beginning of a sentence.
• All the/GCE/papers have to be/marked out
  of/two/hundred.
• All is new. It is non-derivable information.

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4.4 Given and New

• What items can carry information focus?
• Reference (e.g., this) and other closed system
  items (e.g., verbal auxiliaries or prepositions)
  will not carry information focus even when final
  in the IU, unless they carry contrastive
  information.
• //John saw the play yesterday// - not today
• //It lies on the table// - not under

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4.4 Given and New

• Rule The tonic falls on the (accented syllable
  of the) final lexical item in the tone group.
  Closed system items occur as the realization of
  grammatical features.
• This rule is still not complete. The tonic may
  fall anywhere within the tone group. What it
  specifies is unmarked information focus.

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4.4 Given and New

• 1. //John painted the shed yesterday// - Who
  painted the shed yesterday?
• 2. //John painted the shed yesterday// - What did
  John do to the shed yesterday?
• 3. //John painted the shed yesterday// - When did
  John paint the shed?
• 4. //John painted the shed yesterday//
• Examples 1, 2 and 3 are marked in information
  focus, whereas ex. 4 is unmarked in information
  focus. 4 does not trigger a specific question!

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4.4 Given and New

• Rule The tonic falls on the (accented syllable
  of the) final lexical item in the tone group as
  long as unmarked information focus occurs. Closed
  system items that follow are the realization of
  grammatical features and are thus automatically
  unstressed. If marked information focus occurs
  before the last lexical item, the latter is also
  post-tonic and behaves as if belonging to the
  closed system.

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4.5 Some Particular Cases

• Defining and non-defining relative clauses can be
  the result of a different distribution into
  information units.
• 1. //his brother the heart surgeon//
• The heart surgeon is defining.
• 2. //his brother//the heart surgeon//
• The two nominals are in apposition a
  non-defining example.
• Here, information structure determines sentence
  structure.

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4.5 Some Particular Cases

• The IU frequently defines the domain of
  constituents whose status in sentence structure
  does not fully specify a domain for them.
• ? Exaggerated Those words need the help of IUs
  to become strong.

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4.5 Some Particular Cases

• Clause-initial adjuncts
• //For some reason hes//gone away and he hasnt
  left an address//
• He hasnt left an address is part of what is
  unexplained It is within the domain of for some
  reason

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4.5 Some Particular Cases

• //For some reason hes//gone away and he hasnt
  left an address//
• Only hes gone away is within the domain of for
  some reason.

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4.5 Some Particular Cases

• Non-initial items such as only, either or too are
  defined in the same way
• //Yorkshire gained twelve points and won the
  championship//too//
• The domain of too is the whole of the preceding
  IU There must have been an utterance before.
• //Yorkshire gained twelve points//and won the
  championship//too//
• Too relates won the championship to gained twelve
  points. There is no previous utterance.

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4.5 Some Particular Cases

• If one stresses the WH-element in a question
  (instead of the final lexical item), it means
  that one has forgotten the answer, even though
  the question has been asked before.
• //What was the name of the speaker//
• The question element is marked as contrastively
  new.

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4.5 Some Particular Cases

• Contrast in verbal groups
• //He took it// - unmarked positive
• //He did take it// - marked positive
• //He did take it// - contrastive positive

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Net Result

• A piece of discourse consists of a linear
  succession of message blocks, the information
  units, realized by tonality. Each information
  unit is the point of origin for the choice of
  information focus, by which one element is
  selected as focal. In the unmarked case the new
  is, or includes, the final lexical item, but the
  focus can appear at any point in the information
  unit. New information is non-derivable, whereas
  given information is recoverable anaphorically or
  situationally. The information structure provides
  the framework within which all of these choices
  are exercised.