Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Linguistics See comment.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. See the extract.
Wiktionary
- n. linguistics The part of a sentence that provides further information regarding the topic.
Etymologies
- From Greek rhēma, something said, word, subject of a speech (modeled on theme); see wer-5 in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“I think he sees focus as a synonym of topic (rheme?), and not as a synonym of what you have to say about it.”
“Again: rheme (by which Peirce meant a relation of arbitrary adicity or arity) was a first, proposition was a second, and argument was a third.”
“Independent of syntactic word order, theme-rheme or topic-comment sentence structure has the potential to affect the presentation of semantic elements in most languages.”
“A technical explanation of two syntactic phenomena: word order and topic-prominent languages' systematic tools for effecting theme-rheme structures.”
“Most languages can adopt theme-rheme structure idiosyncratically — as for English, we often use as for theme constructions — but topic-prominent languages use systematic changes in syntax or even dedicated morpological elements such as the Japanese clitic particle -wa to mark themes and to set them apart from rhemes.”
“Further, just as we can think of a rheme as an unsaturated predicate, and a dicent as a proposition, we can think of the delome as an argument or rule of inference.”
“And finally, since that sign will also determine an interpretant it can be classified as either a rheme, a dicent, or a delome.”
“Whenever we understand a sign in terms of qualities it suggests its object may have, we generate an interpretant that qualifies its sign as a rheme.”
“To reward the saint for the information, they tear a rag off the shirt and hang it on the briers near by; "where," says the writer, "I have seen such numbers as might have made a fayre rheme in a paper-myll.”
“Much I have written, and it comes to this: The very oddity of object-first syntax in universal human grammar, plus the absence of systematic theme-rheme tools in standard English which, unlike its east Asian variants and the local languages that influence them, is not a topic-prominent language, plus the availability of stylistic variant orders in English that throw entire phrases to the front of sentences for rhetorical effect — all this makes syntactic inversion a striking and powerful poetic device in English.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘rheme’.
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phrontistery-r
from phrontistery.info
rya, rutilant, ruthful, rutherford, ruth, rusticity, rusticate, Russophobia, Russophile, russet, russel, rushlight and 514 more...
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Rognons of Random Palavery
Another of my random palavery lists for terms and phrases that don't fit into any of my other lists.
priorship, exigeant, refectory, reestablish, capper, reesed, quar, reprune, orificial, reaming-iron, terminist, terminism and 3097 more...
Tweets
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