... He licked a fi nger and gaily fl ipped a page. ‘Then all of a sudden you turn
round and cut off the Doctor without a shilling. Well, well. No more incomings,
no more outgoings, for three whole weeks. What you might term a radio
silence. Slammed the door in his face, you did, Mr Cranmer, sir, and me and
Oliver here were wondering why you did that to him. ...
In languages such as Arabic, verbs frequently occur in thematic position, and the
fronting of a predicator is therefore not a marked thematic choice. In translating from
a language such as Arabic to a language such as English, the unmarked predicator
+ subject structure would normally be translated by an equally unmarked structure
such as subject + predicator, rather than by an identical but highly marked structure
which places the predicator in initial position. Going in the other direction, say from
English into Arabic, a translator should try to fi nd some way of conveying the
emphasis attached to a fronted predicator. I cannot comment on the devices available
in other languages, but in Arabic, for instance, the particle qad may be used with the
past tense of the verb to convey emphasis. A lexical item such as ‘in fact’ may also
be used to convey even stronger emphasis. The effect would be similar to something
like and they did in fact publicize it in English, except that the verb in Arabic
would be in theme position (literally: qad publicize-they-it in fact)