A Study Of Subject And Predicate Structures Of Reporting Clauses With Theories Of Information And Focus

A reporting clause is a concept opposite to a speech, which can be used tointroduce direct speeches and indirect speeches. The author finds that there are avariety of academic researches about English reporting clauses at home and abroad,from the perspectives of syntax, function, pragmatics, and semantics and so on.However, there are few relative researches of the subject and predicate structuresof the reporting clauses. And the author attempts to make a research of the structures ofthe reporting clauses without following any adverbial modifier, including the mostcommon structure, that is, the subject-predicate order; and a special inversion structure,that is, the predicate-subject order. The patterns are as following:“…” he/she said.“…” Tom said.“…” he/she cried.“…” Tom cried.“…” said he/she.“…” said Tom.“…” cried he/she.“…” cried Tom.Furthermore, the main theories of information and focus will be adopted in thisthesis, and the former one includes new information, old information and informationvalue, while the latter one includes information focus, contrastive focus, semanticfocus, topic focus, and psychological focus and the principle of end-focus. Theseconcepts make up a relatively complete theory framework of the research.Meanwhile, the author has combined the quantitative methodology with thequalitative one. In the process of quantitative analyses, a large number of propercorpora of the reporting clauses are chosen in two foreign literary works and threegrammar books to figure out the quantities and rates of them in different tables. Inthe process of qualitative analyses, the reasons of differences of the quantities andrates in the corpora are given so as to further prove the feasibility of theories ofinformation and focus. And the process of quantitative and qualitative analyses alsobecomes the research focuses and difficulties of this thesis.