Tsr Formation as a Discourse Substratum in Hawaii Creole English

Hawaii Creole English presents a particular type of utterance structure, the "dollar utterance," which might be regarded as ill-formed in terms of the form-meaning coalition in Standard English (SE). Nonetheless, such an utterance seems to reflect an underlying discourse process in which three discourse representations — Theme, Scheme, Rheme — interact. An analysis is given within the framework of Schema theory to explain this unique linguistic phenomenon in Hawaii Creole English. The scheme, which is the most important entity of the three, resides either in the preceding text or in the abstract knowledge structure of human cognition. It is further claimed that the formation of Theme, Scheme, Rheme could have been transferred from Japanese as one of its substratum features in discourse. The probability of Japanese substratal influence is highly supportable from both linguistic and sociohistorical evidence.