Microsoft Word Theoretical Course of English Grammar

Nino Kirvalidze
66
third sentence the prepositional object 
to us
, denoting the narrator, is more or less transitional 
element, whereas the informative peak once more coincides with the predicative – 
of any help
.
But the communicative (i.e. informational) structure of the sentence doesn’t always coin-
cide with its syntactic structure. The actual division, in which the rheme is rendered by the 
subject and the theme - by the predicate or its part, can be reviewed as “reverse actual divi-
sion”. For example:
Through the open window came the purr of an approaching motor car.
The actual division of the sentence is closely connected with a concrete context of speech 
which makes it possible to divide the informative parts of the communication into those 
“already known” or “not yet known” to the listener or reader. Consider, for example, the 
circumstances under which the sentences like the following might be uttered: 
1.
The box is empty
. 
2.
The girl had a little basket in her hand
. 
The strongest logical stress and highest pitch fall on the words 
empty
and 
basket
, being 
the centre of communication. The first sentence might be uttered when, for example, the 
speaker and the hearer, sharing the common physical environment, have both been confronted 
by a box. Therefore, 
the box
represents the theme of the information, while 
is empty
represents 
its rheme. In the second sentence, 
the girl
is treated as the theme of the message, while 
a basket
is considered to be the rheme carrying a new piece of information for whose sake the sentence 
has been uttered. Such a distribution of the information according to its oldness and newness is 
possible due to the linguistic context that might have been created by t he previous sentence: 
They saw a girl walking along the path
.
Most sentences in English admit the theme-rheme division. However there is a number of 
sentences which convey only new information. These are mainly impersonal sentences with 
dummy “it
”
(
It is raining. It is morning. There was a lot of war.
) and passive constructions 
without the “by-object” in them, the subject used with a zero article (For example: 
Shop and 
office windows were smashed. Cars were burnt.
). 
Among the linguistic means that mark the distinction between the theme and the rheme 
researchers name such structural elements of the language as word-order patters, intonation 

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Theoretical Course of English Grammar 
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