Parcelling” and segmentation in English sentence-structure

Flexibility in sentence-structure merits consideration in sentence-patterning with the so-called "parcelling" by which we mean placing a syntactically dependent sentence-element out of its usual sentence frame and setting it off by a full stop like an independent unit.

Parcelling is not infrequent in spoken English and literary prose. In such isolated position we may find adverbial adjuncts, objective complements, attributes and epithet adjuncts. The expressive value of such sentence-patterns, marked by special intonation contours in actual speech, makes them most effective.

1. Adverbial adjuncts in isolated position:

Suddenly my mind leapt clear. "I should like to talk about that", I said. "Not tonight. Tomorrow or the next day". (Ch. Snow)

They ran close into wind. Slowly. Fantastically slowly. (Aldridge)

Now, on this course, they were running with the breakwater. Level with it. But out to sea and away from it. And fast. (Aldridge)

"I have been glancing into some of the rooms. Let's go to Coney Island, old sport. In my car. "It's too late". (Fitzgerald)

2. Isolated predicatives:

He was exhausted. Completely finished, and sick with the balt water in him. (Aldridge)

3. Isolated subject-groups in patterns with the introductory it:

It had been the most ironical thing of all. To arrive from Gadvos after releasing those from the Metaxists. To come back here and meet Metaxists from Egypt who want cooperation. (Aldridge)

4. Isolated parts of complex modal predicate:

If you have troubles let me share them. You are so much to me — my only trouble I can fix your life. Join it with mine. (Dreiser)

5. Isolated attributive adjuncts:

He had reached the centre of Parliament Square, when a figure coming towards him swerved suddenly to its left and made in the direction of Victoria. Tall, with a swing in its walk. (Galsworthy)

6. Prepositional and prepositionless objects in isolated position: Brian said to his cousin: "I'm signing on as well in a way, only for

life. I'm getting married". Both stopped walking. Bert took his arm and stared: "You're not".

"Гam. To Pauline. Don't you think we've been courting long enough?" (Sillitoe)

They have snakes in England; jungle and wild animals and mountains. Cities and swamps and big rivers. You look as if you don't believe me. (Sillitoe)

She was interrupted at that point. By me. (Salinger). - In such syntactic arrangements the hierarchy of the spoken chain breaks into segments.

The final intonation of the segments seems to convert them into independent syntactic units. The syntagmatic subordination of the sepa-

rated element comes to be neutralised by its intonation independence.

And here are a few typical examples of sub-clauses placed for emphasis out of their usual sentence frame and set of by a full stop like independent units:

"I could be content", went on Hurstwood, "if I had you to love me. If I had you to go; for a companion". (Salinger)

I thought of the future, and spoke of the past. Because Holly wanted to know about my childhood. (Capote)

It sounds like it. As though tigers were loose in Holly's apartment. (Capote)

Sentence disintegration of this type is not specifically English and will be found in other languages.

A few typical examples from French are:

Il commença à attendre. La nomination qui allait arriver, pour une ville inconnue. Les ressources de la province. La vie tranquille et l'hôtel. (Conchon)

Elle a été déportée. Avec sa mère. (Langfus)

Il continue ici à vivre comme un lion. Il se but, Pour les autres. (Laffitte)

Violette riait. Atrocement faut. (Conchon) ¹

Cf: Хотелось яркого света, толпы, шума улиц. Услышать изысканную речь. (Сейфулина)

Какие стволы у осин! Цвета кошачьих глаз. (Ю. Казаков)²

Выходит великий гонщик. Без шапки. И еще какие-то люди с ним. Тоже рыжие. (Олеша)

Нет, ему нужен был именно этот — чужой. Мечтанный. Невозможный. (Цветаева)

Closely related to "parcelling" is "segmentation".

Parcelling and segmentation are both intended to give emphatic prominence to the separated sentence-elements and as such have much in common. But the two syntactic devices are not absolutely identical.

Parcelling can split a sentence into two or more parts, whereas segmentation is, in fact, a twofold designation, a special kind of reduplication where the sentence is split into two interdependent sentence-elements related as "the theme" and "the rheme" respectively, the former being set off in a position of an independent unit.

Segmentation is also one of the universal features of syntactic arrangement. Structures of this kind are not specifically English and are known to be fairly common in other languages. A few typical examples for illustration:

And those geese — they don't seem, to mind your counting their features, do they? (Galsworthy)

¹ See: А. А. Андриевская. Явления сепаратизации в стилистическом синтаксисе современной художественной прозы. М., «Филологические науки», 1969.

² Парцелляция, ее коммуникативно-экспрессивные и синтаксические функции. В кн.: «Морфология и синтаксис современного русского литературного языка». М., 1968.

"This is fantastic", murmured Jolyon. Well, the fellow couldn't force his wife to live with him. Those days were past away! And he looked round at Soames with the thought: "Is he real, this man?" (Galsworthy)

And what about twilight sleep? Why hadn't he been there? He might have — nature. Damn it! Nature — as if it couldn't leave even her alone! (Galsworthy)

There are important treatments of the subject in Ch. Bally's Linguistique générale et Linguistique française, where segmented sentences are referred to as consisting of two parts: "theme" and "propos". The "theme" is generally represented in "propos" by pronouns. If the "theme" (noun) precedes the "propos" (pronoun), the structure is called a reprise, if the "propos" (pronoun) precedes the "theme", the structure is referred to as anticipation. Segmented sentences have always a middle pause and special intonation.

Segmented structures make the long established order of words in French less rigid, the lexical unit functioning in a sentence becoming ever more independent. This new trend in the development of French syntax is gaining attention of many scholars as one of the most striking features of its progressive development.

The subject has been discussed in A. A. Andrievskaya's work-paper «Характерные черты современного французского синтаксиса»¹, where we find the following tabulated survey:

1) the necessary repetition of the direct object expressed by a pronoun (the only case of the pre-position of the direct object in traditional word- order in French), e. g.:

Je la reprendrai, ma place. Je la bus, ma bouteille.

2) the necessary repetition of any object placed at the head of the sentence, e. g.:

Ces paroles, elle les prononça d'un ton tranquille.

3) the necessary repetition of the object expressed by a whole clause ("Proposition conjonctionnelle"), e. g.:

Que la position fut entièrement changée, je ne le pensais pas.

4) the repetition of the subject, with adverbs at the head of the sentence, e. g.:

Ainsi la vie sociale les reprenait-elle.

5) the necessary repetition of the noun-subject in the inverted structure of a question, e. g.:

Mon frère, est-il venu?

PROBLEMS OF THE ACTUAL DIVISION OF THE SENTENCE

(Functional Sentence Perspective)

Syntactic description may begin with "discourse" analysis as its starting point.

In these terms, syntax is described as "textlinguistics" concerned primarily with the grammatical organisation and semantic aspects of supra-phrasal unities.

«Наукові записки», т. 16. Вип. 5. К., 1957, pp. 73-104.

A supra-phrasal unity usually functioning as a communicative whole consists of a number of semantically related sentences. In writing it corresponds to "paragraph", in spoken language this semantic unity is signalled by pausation.

A "paragraph" is a traditional term used in manuscripts and printing to indicate a distinct subdivision of a discourse, chapter, or writing. It is marked off by indentation at the beginning and a break in the line at the end.

As a logical category the paragraph is characterised by coherence and relative unity of the ideas expressed, as a linguistic category it is a communicative unit marked off by such formal linguistic means as intonation and pauses of various lengths.

A supra-phrasal unit is analysed into sentences and phrases as interdependent units, the value of which results from the simultaneous presence of the others.

Paragraphs in pictorial and emotive prose break up the narrative not only to facilitate understanding but also for emphasis.

Take the following for illustration:

He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road and far down the pass he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight. (Hemingway)

Robert Jordan stood up to follow him, then reconsidered and, lifting the canvas off the two packs, picked them up, one in each hand, and started with them, just able to carry them, for the mouth of the cave. He laid one pack down and lifted the blanket aside, then with his head stooped and with a pack in each hand, carrying by the leather shoulder straps, he went into the cave. (Hemingway)

It was hot that night. Both she and her mother had put on thin, pale, low frocks. The dinner flowers were pale. Fleur was struck with the pale look of everything; her father's face, her mother's shoulders; the pale panelled walls, the pale grey velvety carpet, the lamp-shade, even the soup was pale. There was not one spot of colour in the room, not even wine in the pale glasses, for no one drank it. What was not pale was black — her father's clothes, the butler's clothes, her retriever stretched out exhausted in the window, the curtains black with a cream pattern. A moth came in, and that was pale. And silent was that half-mourning dinner in the heat. (Galsworthy)

Discourse analysis then carries our attention to the actual division of the sentences making up a supra-phrasal unity, i.e. their communicative function in a given situation, in other words, the "functional sentence perspective", which is, in fact, the main category on this level of linguistic analysis.

By actual division we mean dividing a sentence into two sections, one of which contains that which is the starting point of the message — "the theme", and the other — the new information for which the sentence has been spoken or written — "the rheme".

The two terms are Greek in origin: "theme" comes from the Greek root the- "to set", "to establish" and means "that which is set or established". The term "rheme" is derived from the root rhe - "to say" or "tell" and means "that which is said or told about".

There have been several pairs of terms proposed for this purpose, such as "psychological subject" and "psychological predicate"¹, "lexical subject" and "lexical predicate"², "semantic subject" and "semantic predicate". The terms "psychological subject" and "psychological predicate", introduced by the German scholar H. Paul³, include a notion of individual psychology, which is beyond the sphere of linguistics itself. Other terms seem to be inadequate as incompatible with our general approach to analysing language phenomena.

Variation in actualising a word or a phrase in a sentence is organically combined with changes in the order of words.

The grammatical arrangement of words in such patterns may well illustrate the fact that the formal and the logical subject of the utterance are two independent elements.

The hierarchy of the components of the utterance is generally made explicit by their syntagmatic relations in the grammatical organisation of the sentence.

We naturally cannot say that every sentence must necessarily consist of two such sections. Some sentences, one-member sentences, in particular, cannot be divided up in this way, and things are not clear with some other types.

However, most sentences do consist of these two sections and the relation between the syntactic structure of the sentence and its division into those two sections merit consideration.

In most Indo-European languages the logical structure of the thought expressed by a sentence is indicated by word-order but the functional value of the order of words is naturally not always the same in languages of different types, where we always find their own idiosyncratic traits and conventional practices of different character.

In a language with a highly developed morphological system and free word order arrangement the order of words is widely used as a means to make the functional sentence perspective explicit.

In languages like English or French, for instance, the grammatical function of the fixed word-order does not always permit the rearrangement of sentence-elements.

Recourse is often made to other linguistic devices doing this duty, e. g.: specific syntactic patterns, articles, particles and adverbs of em-

¹ See: H. Paul. Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte. 5th Ed., Halle, 1937, p. 124.

² See: А. И. Смирницкий. Синтаксис английского языка. M., 1957.

³ See: J. Firbas. Some Thoughts on the Function of Word-Order in Old English and Modern English. 1959.

phatic precision (even, only, merely, solely, too, just, notably, particularly, especially, positively, etc.), prosodic (suprasegmental) means, such as variation in pitch, emphatic stress, pausation, etc.

The classifying indefinite article is very often used to introduce something that makes part of the new information. Examples are numerous.

Examine the following for illustration:

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