Explaining The Discontinuous Nominal Group

Fawcett (2010: 261):

Typically, the elements of a unit occur in an uninterrupted sequence. Such a unit can be said to be a continuous unit, and its elements are in the simple 'segmental' relationship of adjacency to each other. This conforms to the general principle that, once a performer has begun on the production of a semantic unit — and so on the production of the syntactic unit in which it is realised — it is helpful to the addressee to finish it before starting on another unit.

But sometimes this principle of "Finish the current unit" is in conflict with one or more other principles. Two of these are what we may call the "Get the pivotal element in soon" principle and the "End weight" principle. For a fuller presentation of these principles, which can be compared with those in Leech (1983), see Fawcett (in press).

In an example such as The time has come when you must leave, the nominal group filling the Subject is the time [...] when you must leave. But it is a discontinuous nominal group, with the qualifier when you must leave following the Main Verb leave come. In such examples the combined influence of the "Get the pivotal element in soon" principle and the "End weight" principle is more powerful than the everyday "Finish the current unit" principle, and the clause moves to the pivotal element of the Main Verb come as quickly as it can, letting the semantically 'heavy' qualifier from the nominal group when you must leave follow, probably with its own information unit, i.e., in its spoken form:

|| the time has come | when you must leave ||

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, a functional grammar explains this type of variation in terms of function, rather than formal principles. In SFL Theory, the variation is explained as motivated by the textual metafunction. The nominal group in Fawcett's example is discontinuous in order achieve the desired texture in terms of Theme-Rheme and Given-New.

To explain, the most probable focus of New information in Fawcett's example is leave, and the discontinuous nominal group positions leave in the unmarked location of New information: 

If this option is not taken, then either the unmarked focus of New information falls on come, which is unlikely to be the focus in this context:

or else leave is presented as marked information focus, which carries the additional semantic feature of contrast (Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 282):

which may have unintended interpersonal implications, depending on tenor.

[2] As previously observed, Fawcett (in press) is still unpublished, 21 years after the first edition of this publication.

[3] To be clear, in the unmarked case, this rendering assigns an additional tonic prominence to come, making it the first focus of information. A more probable rendering would be a single tone group uttered with tone 1:

// 1 ‸ the / time has / come when / you must / leave //