Actual Division of the Sentence

1. Semantic roles.
2. The basic principles of sentence division. Actual division of the sentence.
3. The notion of theme and rheme. The notion of transition.
4. The notion of topic and comment. Topicalization.
5. Language means of expressing the theme.
6. Language means of expressing the rheme.
7. Actual division of sentences with non-finite forms of the verb. Constructions with the double/triple rheme.

 

The actual division of the sentence exposes its informative perspective showing what immediate semantic contribution the sentence parts make to the total information conveyed by the sentence.

The sentence can be divided into two sections: theme and theme. The theme expresses the starting point of communication; it means that it denotes an object or a phenomenon about which something is reported. The rheme expresses the basic informative part of the communication, emphasizing its contextually relevant centre.

Language has special means to express the theme: the definite article and definite pronominal determiners, a loose parenthesis and the direct word-order pattern.

Means to express the rheme include: a particular word order with a specific intonation contour, an emphatic construction, a contrastive complex, intensifying particles, the indefinite article, ellipsis, and graphical means.