Discourse, Themes and Word Order in Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

The framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) boasts many elegant analyses of syntactic and semantic phenomena. However, little emphasis to date has been placed on syntactic structures when influenced by semantic or pragmatic considerations, such as that of theme and rheme in languages like Russian. Clearly, Russian grammar follows other principles, but the role of contextual information is crucial to determining word order and intonational patterns; these are facts which are hard to reconcile with generative frameworks which have no account of pragmatics. This paper seeks to lay the foundation for an analysis of pragmatic concerns in HPSG, building from analyses by Pollard and Sag (1987, 1994), and concentrating on the ‘simplest’ examples of literary Russian. In a language like Russian, with a high degree of case marking, it is unsurprising to find very free word order. However, there is an important constraint on word order; Russian divides of sentences into two parts: one of old information, and one of new information. Such an analysis, that of the functional sentence perspective, labels these parts topic and comment or theme and rheme. Their purpose, roughly, is that the theme indicates the subject of the utterance, and the rheme conveys new information essential to the speaker (Krylova and Khavronina 1988:11). Just what part of the sentence qualifies for these roles may depend on any number of different factors, including such elusive phenomena as the emotional state of the speaker and intonational patterns involved; herein lies the problem of a generative analysis of the facts.