Means of expressing the “theme” and “rheme” in the sentence

The terms "theme" and "rheme" are both derived from Greek, and are parallel to each other. The term "theme" comes from the Greek root the- 'to set', or 'establish', and means 'that which is set or established'. The term "rheme" is de-rived from the root rhe -'to say', or 'tell', and means 'that which is said or told' (about that which was set or established beforehand). These terms are also convenient because adjectives are easily de-rived from them: "thematic" and "rhematic", respectively.

What, then, are the grammatical means in Moder English which can be used to characterise a word or word group as thematic, or as rhematic? We should note in passing, however, that it will hardly be possible to completely isolate the grammatical from the lexical means, and we shall have to discuss some phe-nomena which belong to lexicology rather than grammar, pointing out in each case that we are doing so.

The means of expressing a thematic or a rhematic quality of a word or phrase in a sentence to a great extent depend on the grammatical structure of the given language and must differ considerably, according to that structure.

Thus, in a language with a widely developed morpho-logical system and free word order, word Order can be ex-tensively used to show the difference between theme and rheme. For instance, word order plays an important part from this viewpoint in Russian. Without going into particulars, we may merely point out the difference between two such sentences as Старик вошел and Вошел старик. In each case the word (or the part of the sentence) which comes last corresponds to the rheme, and the rest of the sentence to the theme. It is quite clear that no such variation would be possible in a corresponding English sentence. For instance we could not, in the sentence The old man came in, change the order of words so as to make the words the old man (the subject of the sentence) correspond to the rheme instead of to the theme. Such a word order would be impossible and we cannot make the words old man ex-press the rheme without introducing further changes into the structure of the sentence.

In Modern English there are several ways of showing that a word or phrase corresponds either to the rheme or to the theme. We will consider the rheme first.