Does a New Information Structure about Cosmetic Outcome of Breast-Conserving Treatment Result in a Better Informed Patient? Outcome of a Comparative Case Study

Communication involves the actual use of language in real. As we have known that language is the main medium for communication. One of the important thing to develop the effective communication is by packaging the structure of information. There are two basic elements in the information, they are: theme and rheme. Theme had been considered as the known information and the rheme absolutely had been considered as new information. This paradigm based on the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Halliday considers language as having three main functions: (1) the ideational function; (2) the interpersonal function; and (3) the textual function. This paper will focus in the textual function and “clause as a message”. Arabic language has a unique structure of clauses, we can find two basic notions (mubtada’+khabar) and (fi’l+fa’il), in the other hand, semantically, we can find (musnad+musnad ilaih), so this article tried to find the correlation between the structure of Arabic clauses with (theme+rheme) construction. This article also will find out the kinds of theme in Arabic language (multiple themes, clause as themes, and predicated themes). Theme as an initial element in SFL should be described by looking the rheme in the text. The method in this research was divided into three parts: (1) collecting the data from the book of Modern Written Arabic and also some articles in the Arabic-Javanese translation book Bidayah al-Hidayah, the data is the clauses with nominal and verbal initial; (2) analysis data, using the descriptive analysis and distributional method; and (3) reporting the data (formal and informal). The result of this article had concluded that there is a near connection between (mubtada’+khabar), (fi’l+fa’il), and (musnad+musnad ilaih) with the theme and rheme construction based on the SFL theory.

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Can familiarity lessen the effect of locality? A case study of Mandarin Chinese subjects and the following adverbials

Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics ◽

10.1515/psicl-2015-0018 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 51 (3) ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Chunshan Xu ◽

Haitao Liu

Keyword(s):

Mandarin Chinese ◽

Word Frequency ◽

Information Structure ◽

Activation Level ◽

New Information ◽

Information Status ◽

Starting Point ◽

The Subject ◽

Chinese Subjects

AbstractThis paper explores the relation between familiarity of Chinese subjects and the syntactic distance. We propose two hypotheses: (1) contextually given Mandarin Chinese subjects are more likely to be used with long intervening adverbials than contextually new subjects; and (2) subjects with higher word frequency are more likely to be followed by long adverbials than those with lower word frequency. The data from two Mandarin Chinese treebanks provide supportive evidence for the first hypothesis, but not the second. Cognitively, this is probably due to the possibility that contextual givenness, which reflects familiarity, may lessen the effect of locality by increasing the activation level (the accessibility) of the subject and rendering these subjects less susceptible to the memory decay caused by the adverbials intervening between them and the predicate verbs. Subjects are usually the starting point of a sentence, which has a default given–new information structure. Therefore, when organizing a sentence, we are dominantly concerned with the information status (contextual givenness) relative to previous context when choosing the subjects, which may partly accounts for the observed irrelevance between word frequency and the use of adverbials. A sentence is structured based on the information status of the subjects, not their word frequency.

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