ABSTRACT
One of the most obvious features of this section is that every clause begins with the word WE as Churchill catalogues the efforts that he pledges will be undertaken in order to defend the country from Nazi invasion – a variety of actions, but all grouped together in terms of what “we” will do. From the point of view of the textual organisation of the speech, what Churchill has done is to anchor the text at this point on the idea of “we, the British people” and to develop this idea in a variety of ways, one after the other. In functional terms we refer to the anchor of the clause, or series of clauses, as the Theme, and we refer to the rest of the clause, what is said about the Theme, as the Rheme. In English, the Theme comes at the beginning of the clause, but this is not necessarily true of other languages.
