Variation in Thematic-Rhematic Articulation of a Sentence (On the Example of Recordings of the Short Story A Malefactor by Anton Chekhov)

Abstract

The aim of this article is to study the variation of topical structure depending on the intentions of the speaker. The article proposes a method of comparative study of voiced texts via their topical structure, which allows observing paradigmatic potential of a sentence within a preset context. In order to do so, the thematic-rhematic articulation of the text is compared to the articulations of its audio recordings. The deviations observed serve as a representation of the communicative intentions of the speaker. In the short story under consideration, more than a half of the utterances exhibit at least some degree of variation. The examples show that the thematic-rhematic articulation of an utterance influences its meaning, the way it interacts with the context and in some cases even its syntactic structure. Thus, thematic-rhematic articulation is a key concept for describing realization of a sentence in speech.