Language means of expressing the theme and the rheme

Semantic Structure of the Sentence. Semantic Roles and Semantic Configurations.

A semantic role is the underlying relationship that a participant has with the main verb in a clause. It is also known as semantic case, thematic role, deep case (case grammar). Semantic role is the actual role a participant plays in some real or imagined situation, apart from the linguistic encoding of those situations. If, in some real or imagined situation, someone named John purposely hits someone named Bill, then John is the agent and Bill is the patient of the hitting event. Therefore, the semantic role of Bill is the same (patient) in both of the following sentences: John hit Bill. Bill was hit by John.

In both of the above sentences, John has the semantic role of agent. A set of semantic roles and an action expressed by a verb constitute a linguistic semantic model of an extralinguistic situation and are called semantic configuration.

Actual Division of the Sentence ( "functional sentence perspective") exposes the informative perspective of the sentence 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 rheme. The theme is the part of the proposition that is being talked about (predicated). The rheme expresses the basic informative part of the communication, emphasizing its contextually relevant centre. Between the theme and the rheme are positioned intermediary, transitional parts of the actual division of various degrees of informative value.

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.

Many languages, like English, resort to different means in order to signal a new topic, such as:

- Stating it explicitly as the subject (which tends to be considered more topiclike by the speakers).

- Using passive voice to transform an object into a subject (for the above reason).

- Emphasizing the topic using clefting.

- Through periphrastic constructions like "As for...", "Speaking of...", etc.

- Using left dislocation (called topic fronting or topicalization, i. e. moving the topic to the beginning).

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.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-06