226 María de los Ángeles Gómez-González
The excerpts above reveal a number of most important things. The first
is the vast richness entailed by the Theme zone, in terms of function (hous-
ing discourse markers, discourse connectors, vocatives, attitudinal markers,
circumstantial specifications, and/or entities of various orders), syntactic
realization (with the potential of having complex realizations, expanded
through relationships of subordination, coordination or apposition) and
volumewise (having the possibility of being packed within one intonation
unit or extending over more than one unit). Incidentally, the same potential
applies to the Rest (or Rheme). For this reason, here both the Theme and
Rheme zones are viewed not as a discrete locations, with fixed boundaries,
but rather as incremental and flexible zones entailing different kinds of
wave-like or pulse-like points of prominence. Theme profiles an orienta-
tional relationship as a result of the recency effect: discourse scaffolds
normally ground what is to be said on the previous context or the situ-
ational context. By contrast, Rheme exploits the recency effect, i.e. the
saliency of what is said last, in conformity with the principles of End Focus
(the late placement of focal accent) and End Weight (the last mention of
weighty units). Both kinds of prominence conspire to place active dis-
course information within the Theme zone and comparatively less active
material in the Rheme, following the principle of Functional Sentence Per-
spective, i.e. the Given-before-New array of information. But, again, these
are only tendencies, not inviolable principles.
Now, to go back to the Theme zone and to summarize, its flexibility
admits: (a) recursion (paratactic, hypotactic or appositive) within each of
its three orientational subfields, ET, IT, TT – as shown in (6) above – and
as a corollary, (b) either a P1 realization within a larger intonation frame
(e.g. (2a), (6b), (7a), (7b)), or a P2 realization, that is, a broadly ‘clause-
external’ realization, in which case Themes either have one attentional do-
main of their own (e.g. (7a), (7b), (8a), (8b), (9c)) or otherwise extend over
more than one frame (e.g. (1a), (6a), (6c), (9a), (9b)).
The presence/absence of intonational integration at the beginning and/or
end of an utterance implies the presence/absence of corresponding Focus
spans or message peaks (Bolkestein 1998; Hannay 1994). Hence, Themes
that are not marked off intonationally result in their phonological and con-
ceptual ‘compression’, thereby profiling the subsequent discourse
relationship as a single, complex characterization: more has to be squeezed
into a single, limited span of processing time, resulting in a somewhat less
articulated realization. By contrast, detached Theme zones are incremen-
tally coded as separate attentional gestures, thereby enhancing their
cognitive salience and that of the elements within their scope, if only by