David Rose On "Tonic Focus" As A Probe For Markedness

David Rose replied to Dongbing Zhang on SYSFLING on 18 Mar 2023, at 15:21:

Ah, but isn’t the probe for markedness tonic focus? (Themes underlined)...

unmarked

// those who have guns have them lègally //

marked

equative

// those who have gùns // are the ones who have them lègally //

predicated

// it is those who have gùns // who have them lègally //

So the textual function of the Qualifier is IDENTIFICATION rather than PERIODICITY. Back to Bea’s questions, those is esphoric to the embedded Attribute have guns and them is anaphoric to guns (per ET).

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, "tonic focus" is not the probe for markedness. Tonic prominence is the phonological realisation of the focus of New information. An unmarked Theme can be realised by tonic prominence, making it New as well as unmarked Theme.

[2] As a spoken reading reveals, the most likely first tonic in these instances is hàve, not gùns, making the possessing of guns the focus of New information, which is consistent with the issue at stake.

[3] To be clear, the Theme in this thematic equative construction is unmarked, because it conflates with the Subject in a declarative clause:

[4] To be clear, this non-sequitur is a bare assertion, unsupported by evidence. The Qualifier in question is who have guns. IDENTIFICATION is Martin's rebranding of Halliday & Hasan's (1976) grammatical system of reference as his discourse semantic system, and PERIODICITY is Martin's rebranding of writing pedagogy ('Topic Sentence' etc.) mixed with Halliday's grammatical systems of THEME and INFORMATION.

In terms of SFL Theory, textually, the Qualifier is the referent of a demonstrative reference item (those, the) in the same nominal group, and has the status of Given or New information in an unmarked Theme:

[5] This is essentially true, except for the misleading omission of the very important fact that the analysis actually derives from Cohesion In English (Halliday & Hasan 1976). The only contribution of English Text (Martin 1992) was to relabel Halliday & Hasan 'structural cataphora' as Martin's 'esphora' — a term adapted from Ellis (1971). It is very misleading indeed to credit Martin with Halliday & Hasan's original ideas.