Thematization and passivization in Arabic

Abstract

In my analysis, based on the Prague school theory of ‘functional sentence perspective’ the passive will be related to problems of theme (keeping in mind that voice is not fully determined by the theme system). It will be argued that a rigid transformational analysis of Arabic obscures the fact that there are two essentially different strategies in the organization of discourse, namely a great predilection in languages such as English for the true passive construction (i.e., the construction including the agentive phrase: Zaid was struck by Omar) while in Arabic there is an obvious disinclination to its use ( Zaydun darabahu samaru (lit.) Zaid struck him Omar = ‘Zaid was struck by Omar’). It will be shown that the requirement of the normal sequence theme-rheme is more easily met in Arabic - in which the word-order is relatively free-than in English. Thus, if the object of the active clause becomes a theme (i.e. if the roles of actor and theme are separated) the strategy of Arabic is to keep the active voice and resume the thematized object by the pronoun in the contrastive context such as: Mohammad fatah Ib a b, ss ab a bik fatahha Sati (lit.) M. opened the door, the windows opened-them A. English, however, normally reconciles the antinomy between the requirements of functional sentence perspective and those of grammatical word-order by the use of the passive voice: M. opened the door, the windows were opened by A. English appears to favor the passive structure because the passive allows the actor - if it is to be specified - to occur at the end of the clause and thus carry the unmarked information focus; on the other hand, Arabic may place the actor at the end of the active clause, since the unambiguous semantic interpretation is guaranteed by the resumptive pronoun on the predicate.