The Analysis of the Thematic Structure of the Standard Arabic Clause: A Special Focus on Verb-initial Structures

Abstract

The objective of the present paper is to give a detailed presentation of how the thematic structure is expressed in Standard Arabic (SA) and how different it is from that of English language. SA is a language which displays different linguistic properties in comparison to English, the language around which the Systemic Functional Grammar theory (SFG) was first developed (Halliday, 1994). Very few studies have been carried out to study the thematic structure of SA and none of them deals with all types of sentence structures in this language. Abdul-Raof’s study is a case in point (Abdul-Raof, 1998); he is mainly concerned with studying the thematic structure of nominal clauses i.e. clauses starting with nouns, despite the fact that Arabic is a language where VSO structures are frequently used. It is precisely at the level of VSO structures that the analysis of thematic structure in Arabic becomes problematic.  Contrary to what previous studies in this area of enquiry say, I will mainly argue that the verb cannot be considered Theme in SA. It is also worth noting that the present work is part of a general endeavour to develop a Systemic Functional Grammar of SA.