Interpretacja „w czasie rzeczywistym”: struktura tematyczno-rematyczna a teoria relewancji

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between the abstractly understood Thematic- Rhematic Structure (TRS) of utterances, a theoretical approach initiated by Bogusławski (1977), and the “online” processing and interpretation of utterances in real time by the hearer. Focusing on three Polish examples, we propose a more dynamic approach to TRS based on ideas from Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson 1995), and redefine the notions “theme” and “rheme” in dynamic terms, from the hearer’s perspective. We present a formalism for modeling how the multi-level nature of TRS emerges out of real-time processing mechanisms: different theme-rheme divisions may arise at different (earlier or later) stages of processing. A main claim is that presuppositional and stylistic effects related to the flexibility of sentence stress position and word order in Polish can be explained well in such a dynamic model. On the sub-utterance level, both stress position and word order (“exponents” of TSR) serve to guide the hearer’s investment of effort into positing and verifying hypotheses about the explicit and implicit content of the utterance as a whole, while processing by the hearer is still underway.