ined to oral speech only. On closer consideration, however, this view of rheme-identifying role of intonation proves inadequate. To appreciate the true status of intonation in the actual division of the sentence, one should abstract oneself from "paper syntax" (description of written texts) and remember that it is phonetical speech, ie articulately pronounced utterances that form the basis of human language as a whole. As soon as the phonetical nature of language is duly taken account of, intonation with its accent-patterns presents itself not as a limited, but as a universal and indisputable means of expressing the actual division in all types and varieties of lingual contexts. This universal rheme-identifying function of intonation has been described in treatises on logic, as well as in traditional philological literature, in terms of "logical accent". The "logical accent", which amounts linguistically to the "rhematic accent", is inseparable from the other rheme-identifying means described above, especially from the word-order patterns. Moreover, all such means in written texts in fact represent the logical accent, ie they indicate its position either directly or indirectly. This can be seen on all the examples hitherto cited in the present chapter. p align="justify"> While recognising the logical accent as a means of effecting the actual division, we must strictly distinguish between the elements immediately placed under the phonetical, "technical" stress, and the sentence segments which are identified as the informative centre of communication in the true sense of the term.
Technically, not only notional, but functional units as well can be phrasally stressed in an utterance, which in modern printed texts is shown by special graphical ways of identification, such as italics, bold type, etc. Cf.: p align="justify"> "I can't bring along someone who isn't invited." - "But I am invited!" said Miss Casement (I. Murdoch). Moreover, being a highly intelligent young woman, she'd be careful not to be the only one affected (Л. Christie). p align="justify"> However, it would be utterly incorrect to think that in such instances only those word-units are logically, ie rhematically, marked out as are stressed phonetically. As a matter of fact, functional elements cannot express any self-dependent nomination; they do not exist by themselves, but make up units of nomination together with the notional elements of utterances whose meanings they specify. Thus, the phrasal phonetical stress, technically making prominent some functional element, thereby identifies as rhematic the corresponding notional part ("knot") of the utterance as a whole. It is such notional parts that are real members of the opposition "theme - rheme", not their functional constituents taken separately. As for the said functional constituents themselves, these only set up specific semantic bases on which the relevant rhematic antitheses are built up. p align="justify"> The actual division, since it is effected upon the already produced nominative sentence base providing for its contextually relevant manifestation, enters the predicative aspect of the sentence. It makes up part of syntactic predication, because it strictly meets the functional purpose of predication as such, which is to relate the nominative content of the sentence to reality (see Ch. XXI). This predicative role of the actual division shows that its contextual relevance is not reduced to that of a passive, concomitant factor of expression. On the contrary, the actual division is an active means of expressing functional meanings, and, being organically connected with the context, it is not so much context-governed as it is | context-governing: in fact, it does build up concrete contexts out of constructional sentence-models chosen to reflect different situations and events.
One of the most important manifestations of the immediate contextual relevance of the actual division is the regular deletion (ellipsis) of the thematic parts of utterances in dialogue speech. By this syntactic process, the rheme of the utterance or its most informative part (peak of informative perspective) is placed in isolation, thereby being very graphically presented to the listener. Cf.: p align="justify"> "You've got the letters?" - "In my bag" (GW Target). "How did you receive him?" - "Coldly" (J. Galsworthy). p align="justify"> In other words, the thematic reduction of sentences in the context, resulting in a constructional economy of speech, performs an informative function in parallel with the logical accent: it serves to accurately identify the rheme of the utterance .
XXIII. COMMUNICATIVE TYPES OF SENTENCES
sentence is a communicative unit, therefore the primary classification of sentences must be based on the communicative principle. This principle is formulate...
