Rheme

Rheme 

in the theory of the actual division of a sentence, one of the two basic components of an utterance, contrasted to the theme. The rheme, or nucleus, contains the new information of the sentence and represents one of the sentence’s centers of meaning. In the sentence Zhenu on sebe vybral/khoroshuiu (“The wife he chose for himself was a good one”), the rheme is khoroshuiu (“a good one”). The rheme is distinguished by word order and intonation in Slavic and Germanic languages. In many languages there are either morphological means of distinguishing the rheme or special syntactic constructions, such as the French c’est.. qui/que construction. In Russian, the rheme is usually found at the end of a phrase. When word order is changed, the stress of the phrase shifts and falls on the rheme in an intensified form, as when Muzei/zakryt becomes Zakryt muzei (“The museum is closed”).

REFERENCES

Grammatika sovremennogo russkogo lit. iazyka. Moscow, 1970. (Section on word order.)
Raspopov, I. P. Aktual’noe chlenenie predlozheniia. Ufa, 1961.
Adamec, P. Poriadok slov v sovremennom russkom iazyke. Prague, 1966.
Prazhskii lingvisticheskii kruzhok. Moscow, 1967.

T. M. NIKOLAEVA