theme (n.)

A term used in LINGUISTICS as part of an analysis of the structure of SENTENCES (their thematic structure): it refers, not to the subject-matter of a sentence (its everyday MEANING), but to the way speakers identify the relative importance of their subject-matter, and is defined as the first major CONSTITUENT of a sentence (seen here as a STRING of constituents). There is no necessary correspondence with a FUNCTIONAL grammatical ELEMENT (though in English theme and SUBJECT often coincide) e.g. The man is going, His hair I can’t stand, Smith her name was, Under no condition will he . . . The process of moving an element to the front of the sentence in this way (‘fronting’), to act as theme, is known as thematization (sometimes TOPICALIZATION) or thematic fronting. Some linguists systematically distinguish this notion from other ways of analyzing the organization of the sentence structure of messages, such as the TOPIC/ COMMENT distinction, or an analysis in terms of INFORMATION structure.

In the PRAGUE SCHOOL approach to linguistics, theme is opposed to RHEME, producing a distinction similar to that of topic/comment, but interpreted with reference to the theoretical framework of FUNCTIONAL SENTENCE PERSPECTIVE. In this theory, the theme is defined as the part of a sentence which adds least to the advancing process of communication (it has the lowest degree of COMMUNICATIVE DYNAMISM); in other words, it expresses relatively little (or no) extra meaning, in addition to what has already been communicated. The rheme, by contrast, carries the highest degree of communicative dynamism. Various transitional expressions, neither ‘thematic’ nor ‘rhematic’, are also recognized.