Вестник Кемеровского государственного университета (May 2022)
Topic-Comment Relation as a Means of Textual Organization
Abstract
Mechanisms of topic-comment relations, or actual division of the sentence, attracted scientists of previous centuries. However, the general idea was that of connection between the theme and the rheme. Subject and predicate connection is an independent unit of grammatical and logical unity. In spontaneous speech, such units are seldom coherent. The coherence is a result of the speaker’s purpose that turns a flow of sentences into a super-phrasal unity with a common theme and syntactic coherence. The connection of the theme and the rheme makes a foundation for the hyper-theme and the hyperrheme of the narrative. The research featured the ways of transmitting the new and the known to the recipient. It also included coherence achieved by inversion, when the rheme can be interpreted as the theme as a result of inverted word order. A comparative analysis of parts within the super-phrasal unity revealed an important semantic-syntactic entity called "abstract" as a minimal element of text division. The predicative-relative complex that unites a few super-phrasal unities accompanies abstract division. Therefore, actual division is much broader than a mere connection of themes and rhemes but remains a part of communicative value in spite of the tendency to identify them as equivalents. A thorough analysis of coherence of linguistic units made it possible to describe the level of their informative value, as well as to single out the semantic components that render the idea to the greatest extent. In an ambiguous situation, it enables to choose the right variant thanks to extra-linguistic connections. Thus, the text is a unit marked by the coherence of semantic and syntactic relations. The text is a realization of the author’s viewpoint developed thanks to a unique concept that constitutes the super-rheme, while the general theme is given in the form of the author’s subjective appeal to the reader.
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