Abstract:
The two parts of the article analyse the possibilities of a functional interpretation,
in terms of the theme-rheme devision, of ancient texts. The author discusses examples
from Classical Greek and Latin as well as New Testament Greek, especially
their word order, grammatical and lexical features. On this basis he proposes an analytical approach to the description of the linguistic values connected on some degree
with the communicative structure of these examples. The contextual procedures
of indicating markers of thematic or rhematic elements of the sentences in question
should be compared with conclusions drawing on the grammatical and semantic observations
on the sentence constituents. The determination of theme and rheme exponents
must be made – depending on the language – by verifying the means of coding
information structure, relevant to the given language, text type, and time of its
composition. A complete description of these means should be proceeded by detailed
investigation of, for example, in the case of Ancient Greek: standard and contrastive
word order, initial positions of utterances (including semantic description of items
involved in these positions), functions of the particles, conjunctions, articles, adverbs,
personal pronouns, anaphors et al., syntactic and semantic roles of the constituents,
etc. The second part of this article considers information status and value of Greek
prolepsis. The author distinguishes morphological, syntactic and lexical prolepsis.
The last two types are discussed using examples from Medea by Euripides and the
Gospel of St. John. The first example represents syntactic prolepsis, the second one
– lexical. Neither the pronoun ἡμᾶς ‘we’ from Medea, nor the noun φοινίκων ‘palm
branches’ from St. John’s Gospel are thematic as claimed by some researches. Both
syntactic and lexical prolepsis are components of a different level of utterances than
the material one. The author postulates to consider them as rhematic rather than thematic. Prolepsis functions like quotation which comments on the whole utterance.
