The notion of actual division of the sentence.

The components of actual division: the theme, the rheme, the transition.

Besides the nominative aspect of the semantics of the sentence, which reflects the situation named with its various components, the sentence expresses predicative semantics, which reflects various relations between the nominative content of the sentence and reality. One of the first attempts to analyze linguistically the contextually relevant communicative semantics of the sentence was undertaken by the scholars of the Prague Lingistic Circle at the beginning of the 20^th century.

The Czech linguist Vilém Mathesius was the first to describe the informative value of different parts of the sentence in the actual process of communication, making the informative perspective of an utterance and showing which component of the denoted situation is informationally more important from the point of view of the speaker. This linguistic theory is known as the actual division analysis.

The main components of the actual division of a sentence are the theme and the rheme.

The theme (originally called “ the basis ” by V. Mathesius) is the starting point of communication, a thing or a phenomenon about which something is reported in the sentence; it usually contains some old, “already known” information.

The rheme (originally called “ the nucleus ” by V. Mathesius) is the basic informative part of the sentence, its contextually relevant communicative center, the “peak” of communication, or the information reported about the theme; it usually contains some new information.

There may be transitional parts of actual division of various degrees of informative value, neither purely thematic, nor rhematic; this part is called “ a transition ”. For example: Again Charlie is late. – Again (transition) Charlie (theme) is late (rheme).

The rheme is the obligatory informative component of a sentence, there may be sentences which include only the rheme; the theme and the transition are optional.

In English, with its fixed word order, direct actual division means that the theme coincides with the subject in the syntactic structure of the sentence, while the rheme coincides with the predicate of the sentence, as in Charlie is late. – Charlie (theme) is late (rheme).

In some sentences, the rheme may be expressed by the subject and it may precede the theme, which is expressed by the predicate, e.g.: Who is late today? – Charlie (rheme) is late (theme).

This type of actual division is called “ inverted” or “ reverse ”.

There are special formal lingual means of expressing the distinction between the meaningful center of the utterance, the rheme, and the starting point of its content, the theme. They are as follows: word order patterns, constructions with introducers, syntactic patterns of contrastive complexes, constructions with articles and other determiners, constructions with intensifying particles, and intonation contours. For example:

– constructions with the anticipatory ‘ it ’, e.g .: It is Charlie who is late; It was back in 1895 that Popov invented radio.

– constructions with articles determiners, eg.: The man (theme) appeared unexpectedly. – A man (rheme) appeared.

In written speech the logical accent is represented by all the other rheme-identifying lingual means, which indicate its position directly or indirectly. They can be technically supported by special graphical means of rheme-identification, such as italics, bold type, underlinings, etc.

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