< Rheme(language, wiki, forked, Proteus)
A
rhema or a
rheme (
also "relative term" and "topic comment"), is a logical term that requires reference to any number of other objects, called the
correlates of the term, in order to
denote a definite object, called the
relate (pronounced with the accent on the first syllable) of the relative term in question. A relative term is typically expressed in ordinary language by means of a phrase with explicit or implicit blanks, for example,
lover of __, or
giver of __ to __.
Linguistics
In
Linguistics, the
topic (or
theme) is informally what is being talked about talked about, and the
comment (
rheme or
focus) is what is being said about the
topic. Although this general nature of topic-comment dichotomy is generally accepted, anything beyond that is a matter of great controversy.
The distinction was probably first suggested by
Henri Weil in 1844.
Georg von der Gabelentz distinguished
psychological subject (roughly topic) and
psychological object (roughly focus). In the
Prague school, the
dichotomy has been studied mainly by
Vilém Mathesius,
Jan Firbas,
František Daneš,
Petr Sgall and
Eva Haji?ová. They were concerned
mainly by its relation to intonation and word-order. The work by
Michael Halliday in 1960s is probably responsible for bringing the ideas to
Generative Linguistics.
Realization of Topic/Comment
Different
languages mark topics in different ways. Distinct intonation and word-order are the most common means. The tendency to place topicalized constituents sentence-initially (
topic fronting) is widespread. Again, linguists disagree on many details.
- English: intonation is the primary means, although word order (e.g., fronting of contrasted topics: Kim, I like.) and other syntactic (passivisation, Clefting) or lexical means ("As for...", "Regarding...") are also employed.
- Japanese: topic is marked with a special clitic postposition (?, wa).
- So called free-word order languages (e.g. Russian, Czech, to a certain extent Chinese or German) use word-order as the primarily means. Usually topic precedes focus. However, for example in Czech, both orders are possible. The order with comment sentence-initial is referred as subjective (V. Mathesius' term, as opposed to objective) and expresses certain emotional involvement. The two orders are distinguished by intonation.
See Also
References
- Georg von der Gabelentz, Die Sprachwissenschaft, ihre Aufgaben, Methoden und bisherigen Ergebnisse T.O. Weigel Nachfolger, 1891
- Charles F. Hockett, A Course in Modern Linguistics. The Macmillan Company: New York 1958. (pp. 191-208)
- Vilém Mathesius, A Functional Analysis of Present Day English on a General Linguistic Basis. edited by Josef Vachek, translated by Libuše Dušková. The Hague - Paris: Mouton 1975.
- Nirit Kadmon, Pragmatics Blackwell Publishers. Blackwell Publishers 2001
- Henri Weil, De l'ordre des mots dans les langues anciennes comparees aux langues modernes: question de grammaire general. 1844. Published in English as The order of words in the ancient languages compared with that of the modern languages. 1887
Relatief
Some content adapted from the Wikinfo article "Relative term" under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Some content adapted from the Pseudopedia article "Topic-comment" under the GNU Free Documentation License.
(last updated by Proteus, 7:51pm EDT - Sat, Apr 07 2007)
