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forming.
Taking into consideration the two-aspective character of the sentence as a signemic unit of language,
predication should now be interpreted not simply as referring the content of the sentence to reality, but as
referring the nominative content of the sentence to reality. It is this interpretation of the semantico-functional
nature of predication that discloses, in one and the same generalized presentation, both the unity of the two
identified aspects of the sentence, and also their different, though mutually complementary meaningful roles.
C H A P T E R XXII
ACTUAL DIVISION OF THE SENTENCE
§ 1. The notional parts of the sentence referring to the basic elements of the reflected situation form, taken
together, the nominative meaning of the sentence. For the sake of terminological consistency, the division of
the sentence into notional parts can be just so called - the "nominative division" (its existing names are the
"grammatical division" and the "syntactic division"). The discrimination of the nominative division of the
sentence is traditional; it is this type of division that can conveniently be shown by a syntag-matic model, in
particular, by a model of immediate constituents based on the traditional syntactic analysis (see Ch. XXIV).
Alongside the nominative division of the sentence, the idea of the so-called "actual division" of the sentence
has been put forward in theoretical linguistics. The purpose of the actual division of the sentence, called also the
"functional sentence perspective", 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 theme
expresses the starting point of the communication, i.e. it denotes an object or a phenomenon about which
something is reported. The rheme expresses the basic informative part of the communication, its cootextually
relevant centre. 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.
Thus, in the following sentences of various emotional character the theme is expressed by the subject, while
the rheme is expressed by the predicate:
Max bounded forward. Again Charlie is being too clever! Her advice can't be of any help to us.
In the first of the above sentences the rheme coincides with the whole predicate group. In the second
sentence the adverbial intro-ducer again can be characterized as a transitional element, i.e. an element
informationally intermediary between the theme and the rheme, the latter being expressed by the rest of the
predicate group. The main part of the rheme-the "peak" of informative perspective-is rendered in this sentence
by the intensified predicative too clever. In the third sentence the addressee object to us is more or less
transitional, while the informative peak, as in the previous example, is expressed by the predicative of any help.
In the following sentences the correlation between the nominative and actual divisions is the reverse: the
theme is expressed by the predicate or its part, while the rheme is rendered by the subject:
Through the open window came the purr of an approaching motor car. Who is coming late but John! There
is a difference of opinion between the parties.
Historically, the theory of actual division of the sentence is connected with the logical analysis of the
proposition. The principal parts of the proposition, as is known, are the logical subject and the logical predicate.
These, like the theme and the rheme, may or may not coincide, respectively, with the subject and the predicate
of the sentence. The logical categories of subject and predicate are prototypes of the linguistic categories of
theme and rheme. However, if logic analyses its categories of subject and predicate as the meaningful
components of certain forms of thinking, linguistics analyses the categories of theme and rheme as the
corresponding means of expression used by the speaker for the sake of rendering the informative content of his
communications.
§ 2. The actual division of the sentence finds its full expression only in a concrete context of speech,
therefore it is sometimes referred to as the "contextual" division of the sentence. This can be illustrated by the
following example: