ABSTRACT
Natural languages have sign-level organisation which goes beyond syntax: para-syntax. In at least some languages, some aspects of para-syntax are phrase-structural, while others are not. Arabic has phrase-structural para-syntax. It is necessary to distinguish abstract levelsof linguistic analysis, such as syntax and para-syntax, from real-semantic notions, such as theme and rheme. In Standard Arabic, the narrower semantic realisations of Nuc/Rhema and Peri/Thema are inadequately covered by notions such as theme and rheme. Only a non-universalist theory, in which general analytical notions such as ‘theme’ and ‘rheme’ are kept out of the theory, is able to avoid ‘hard-wiring’ such features into the data, and therefore undermining its own analytical independence.
