ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author considers theme and rheme as real-world (realisational) informational (semantic) features, and argues that the Hallidayan semantic definition of ‘theme’ and ‘rheme’ is uninterpretable and as such not acceptable. In addition to a para-syntactic-type distinction between what is known/given and what is unknown, new, a further para-syntactic-type phrase-structural bifurcation should be made between the theme, as what the speaker is talking about, and the rheme, as what he or she says about this theme. Halliday, in fact, defines theme, and its counterpart rheme in systemic functional linguistics in very much this way, using the terms ‘given’ and ‘new’ for roughly what other writers term theme and rheme. In fact, the situation in terms of phonetic realisation in Hallidayan linguistics is somewhat more complicated than this. The issue arising from Halliday’s analysis is that of word order.
