Language Means used to Express and Identify the Theme and the Rheme

In modern linguistics within oppositional theory

Continuous aspect vs. the Non-Continuous aspect (common aspect à unmarked (weak) member).

Бархударов:

the peculiar marker - discontinuous morpheme be + -ing.

the difference in meaning:

Continuous aspect is defined as an action in progress, developing at a given moment;

Common aspect doesn’t express duration.

The sentence is the immediate integral unit of speech built up of words according to a definite syntactic pattern and distin­guished by a contextually relevant communicative purpose. It is the main object of syntax as part of the grammatical theory.

The Utterance and its Informative Structure:

The utterance is a unit of speech and in every case it is adapted to the needs of peculiar speech situation. In some parts of the situation the sentence may coincide with the utterance. Every utterance is characterized not only by semantic and syntactic structures, but also by the structure of its own as a message that is it has its informative structure.

Speaking of the actual division of the sentence, we can state that its purpose is to is to reveal the correlative significance of the sentence parts from the point of view of their actual informative role in an utterance, i.e. from the point of view of the immediate semantic contribution they make to the total information conveyed by the sentence in the context of connected speech. In other words, the actual division of the sentence in fact exposes its informative perspective. The main components of the actual division of the sentence are the theme and the rheme. (the Given & the New, the Topic & the Comment).

The theme (the topic) expresses the starting point of the communication, i.e. it denotes an object or a phenomenon about which something is reported. So, it contains the information already known to the speakers called presupposition. It is familiar either from life experience of speakers’ or it is mentioned in the previous context.

The rheme (the comment) contains a new piece of information; the purpose of the utterance is to сonvey it. Between the theme and the rheme are positioned intermediary, tran­sitional parts of the actual division of various degrees of informative value (these parts are sometimes called "transition").

The theme of the actual division of the sentence may or may not coincide with the subject of the sentence. The rheme of the ac­tual division, in its turn, may or may not coincide with the predicate of the sentence-either with the whole predicate group or its part, such as the predicative, the object, the adverbial (in both English and Russian).

Michael Alexander Halliday: the topic (theme) of the sentence is the peg upon which message, i.e. new information is hung.

Classically in two-member s-ces the syntactic subject is its Theme or Topic and the predicate group – its Rheme.

In one-member s-ces usually only the comment or the Rheme is given.

But at the same time there are asymmetrical interrelations between syntactic and informative structures. In Eng. 2-member sentences (with “it”) are treated as consisting of the comment only. → It’s early.

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