228 María de los Ángeles Gómez-González
The unmarked array of EMTs illustrated in Figure 2 represents y (TT),
x (IT) and H (ET) as being arranged in relation to their scope of influence,
suggesting that ET, IT (1) and ET (2) have increasing scopes of influence,
each within the span of the next. Thus ETs profile a backward-looking and
forward-looking relationship pointing to the message itself, but with ITs,
this profiling involves in addition the interlocutors (S and A), while with
TTs the profiling expands to the global logical organization of discourse.
All other arrays are claimed to be marked, or less frequent, or otherwise
determined by item-specific mobility conditions. Note, for example, the
flexibility of however, a textual item, which may appear (a) in the thematic
pre-orientational field (e.g. However, the man didn ́t come), (b) in the the-
matic post-orientational field (The man, however, didn ́t come), (c)
crammed within an EMT (The man, however, the one we saw yesterday,
didn ́t come), or (d) outside the Theme zone (The man didn ́t come, how-
ever).
Consistent with the unmarked array of the Theme zone, three further
orientations will be attributed to EMTs: the high-low orientation, the low-
high orientation and the combined type (cf. Smits 2002). High-low orienta-
tions are those profiled when TTs and/or IT occur in the pre-orientational
field, normally in decreasing scopal spans, in order to provide a textual and
interpersonal ground according to which the subsequent discourse is to be
interpreted. Illustrations can be found in the EMTs in (6) and (7) above. By
contrast, low-high orientations obtain when TTs and/or ITs occur in the
post-orientational zone, as shown in (8) above. Normally arrayed in in-
creasing scopal spans, and in corresponding intonation units, post-
orientational ITs and/or TTs separate ETs from what we have dubbed the
Rest, thereby distributing the focus of attention between both chunks of in-
formation, the ET and the Rest, which are zoomed in on and accordingly
receive cognitive salience (more processing time and thus a fuller realiza-
tion) and focal prominence. In mixed orientations – as the label suggests –
the functional capacities of both high-low orientations and low-high orien-
tations are combined (as in (9) above).
In the following section we shall expand the view that the different
kinds of orientation profiled by the Theme zone, whether representing
marked and unmarked choices, entail different instructions for the camera
angle of discourse.