ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author gives a brief account of the main principles of textual organization in the clause. The general name for this grammatical area is theme, a term which also has the narrower sense in which it was used. In the broader sense theme means thematic organization, the organization of a clause with respect to selection of topic. Information structure is not on quite the same footing as the other five types of organization; the domain in which it operates is, properly speaking, not the clause but the tone group. The theme is the part of a clause that the speaker choose to present as 'what he talks about at this point in the developing discourse; the rheme is what he has to say about it. The author also uses the following names for them: thematization, it-theme, preposed theme, postponed theme, identification and information and takes each structure, rather than spell out its formal characteristics.
