Text Development: Actual Segmentation and Thematic Progression

Abstract

In modern linguistics, questions related to the text organization are considered from different aspects. The approaches that existed up to now to the questions of the schematic structure, cohesion and rhetorical organization of the text help us to understand certain features of the text organization. The article is devoted to the peculiarities of the meaning development, the identification of linguistic and extralinguistic factors that determine the phenomena of semantic division and branching, the definition of information blocks on the basis of English literary texts. Any sentence has in itself something that connects it with the context – with the previous and subsequent sections of the text. The text structure can be provided as a chain of alternating themes and rhemes, joining text elements. The theme – rheme progression by organizing sentences combines them into large units and a whole text. Actual segmentation of a sentence is a problem that linguistics has long drawn attention to. One can often find in scientific papers indications of such a problem as the lack of a single terminological apparatus, since different researchers define the concepts of «theme» and «rheme» differently. Studying the theme and rheme is an integral part of study of grammar theory. These elements play an important role in translating text from one language to another and in the analysis of a literary text. Since with the wrong choice of theme and rheme in the sentence, there may be a misunderstanding of the text meaning. Since the purpose of communication is not a theme, but conveying new information about the theme with emphasis on it, it seems typical for the text building technique to move each speech act in the direction from theme to rheme. New information forms the communicative basis, the core of the sentence. This part, called rheme, helps to deepen thoughts, provide the listener or reader with new information and as a result, depending on the situation, the goals of the addresser reveal new characteristics of the theme. According to his communicative intention, the speaker builds a text in which each element performs a certain function in order to convey information and achieve a specific communicative goal.