1.3.

1 Theme (/ rheme)
The hallmarks of the Prague school are the division of the communicative structure of the sentence into two areas (theme - rheme) or into three (theme - transitional zone - rheme) and the simultaneous assumption that this is the basic order if there is no co(n)textual reason for changing it. The division of the sentence into three segments of structure - grammatical (subject - predicator - object), semantic (agent - action - patient) and communicative (theme transitional zone - rheme) - has been a feature of the research conducted by this linguistic school since Mathesius. However, there is still no agreement about the definition of theme (/ rheme) in a sentence. Some authors try to determine the theme and rheme by means of the information value for the discourse of the various parts of the sentence. According to this theory, the theme is what is known/ given in the text, and the rheme is the unknown/ new. Others assess the theme and rheme according to the contribution of parts of the sentence to the (further) development of a discourse. If the contribution is slight, then the relevant part of the sentence is described as the theme, and if it is considerable, it is called the rheme. Grammatical, lexical and contextual factors work together here to allow the contribution of a part of a sentence towards the development of the discourse to be established. A different functional definition of theme (/ rheme) is to be found in the works of Halliday (1985: 36), who has the following interpretation:
The Theme is a function in the CLAUSE AS A MESSAGE. It is what the message is concerned with: the point of departure for what the speaker is going to say.

For Halliday, the theme is obviously the starting point that a speaker chooses for his message. In English, the theme introduces the sentence:
As a general guide, the Theme can be identified as that element which comes in first position in the clause. (Halliday 1985: 39).

In the following examples, the underlined parts of the sentence are theme.
(16) The duke has given my aunt that teapot. (17) That teapot the duke has given to my aunt. (18) Very carefully she put him back on his feet again.

The schools of thought commented on above relate the term to the sentence. To make the concept clearer, one could speak of sentence theme. The concept of "theme" is also applied to the text. For example, Jones (1977: V) says:
"The ideas about theme developed in this study have their roots in the rather intuitive understanding of theme that most of us had in primary and secondary school - that is, that theme is "main idea" in a text. The theme-line of a text is its "central thread". Theme also may be described as a "minimum generalization" of a text: a statement broad enough to represent the entire text, yet specific enough to represent its uniqueness."

Jones uses the term "theme" in the sense of a textual theme - i.e. what the text is concerned with or what the text is about. However, in the following chapters, I will use "theme" only in the sense of sentence theme. The literature on theme (/ rheme) is extensive and diverse. Two works by Firbas summarizing the Prague school theories are recommended - Firbas (1974, 1983). A wide-ranging discussion of Prague school linguists can be found in Jones (1977: chapter 3). Halliday has developed his ideas on this topic in a number of publications, e.g. Halliday (1967, 1985:

chapter 3). For theme as textual theme see for example Jones (1977: chapter 1) and Brown/ Yule (1983: chapter 4).