May Themes Follow on Rhemes, and Why Might They Do So?

A critique is presented of the use of pragmatic terminology - theme, rheme, topic, focus - in two recent publications in Egyptian linguistics, Antonio Loprieno's "On the Typological Order of Constituents in Egyptian" (JAAL, 1988, 1, 26-57) & W. Schenkel's Einfuhrung in die altagyptische Sprachwissenschaft ([Introduction to Egyptian Linguistics], no bibliographical information provided). Loprieno's concept of pragmatic vs syntactic word orders is shown to apply differently to different constructions; it is argued that neither order is consistently unmarked with respect to the other. The terms "ascending nexus" & "descending nexus" are substituted for theme + rheme + theme orders, respectively. This opposition cannot be found in nominal sentences (NSs), as (1) bimembral NSs with noun subjects are obsolescent, (2) bimembral NSs with pronoun subjects have complementary distribution of the two orders, & (3) trimembral NS types provide no counterpart to the notional difference between the orders seen in adverbial sentences. J. Hitchcock