Thematic meaning

The final category of meaning I shall attempt to distinguish is thematic meaning, or what is communicated by the way in which a speaker or writer organizes the message, in terms of ordering, focus, and emphasis. It is often felt, for example, that an active sentence such as (1) has a different meaning from its passive equivalent (2), although in conceptual content they seem to be the same:

(1) Mrs Bessie Smith donated the first prize.

(2) The first prize was donated by Mrs Bessie Smith.

Certainly these have different communicative values in that they suggest contexts: the active sentence answers an implicit question What did Mrs Bessie Smith donate?, while the passive sentence answers an implicit question Who was the first prize donated by? or (more simply) Who donated the first prize? That is, (1), in contrast to (2), suggests that we know who Mrs Bessie Smith is (perhaps through a previous mention). The same truth conditions, however, apply to each: it would be impossible to find a situation of which (1) was an accurate report while (2) was not, or vise versa.

Thematic meaning is mainly a matter of choice between alternative grammatical constructions, as in:

(3) A man is waiting in the hall.

(4) There’s a man waiting in the hall.

(5) They stepped at the end of the corridor.

(6) At the end of the corridor, they stopped.

(7) I like Danish cheese best.

(8) Danish cheese I like best.

(9) It’s Danish cheese that I like best.

But the kind of contrast of ordering and emphasis illustrated by (1) and (2) can also be contrived by lexical means: by substituting (for example) belongs to for owns:

(10) My brother owns the largest betting-shop in London.

(11) The largest betting-shop in London belongs to my brother.

In other cases, it is stress and intonation rather than grammatical construction that highlights information in the one part of a sentence. If the word electric is given contrastive stress in (12):

(12) Bill uses an electric razor.

(13) The kind of razor that Bill uses is an electric one;

the effect is to focus attention on that word as containing new information, against a background of what is already assumed to be known (viz. that Bill uses a razor). This kind of emphasis could have been equally achieved in English by the different syntactic construction of (13). The sentences bracketed together above obviously have, in a sense, the same meaning; but all the same, we need to acknowledge that their communicative effect may be somewhat different; they will not each be equally appropriate within the same context.