D. V. Demidov

participants in the process, and ―circonstants‖, or elements that 
identify the circumstances of the process [13, p. 318]. Besides the 
predicate, other elements of the sentence also help express 
predication: for example, word order, various functional words 
and, in oral speech, intonation. In addition to verbal time and 
mood evaluation, the predicative meanings of the sentence include 
the purpose of communication (declaration – interrogation – 
inducement), affirmation and negation and other meanings. 
As the description above shows, predication is the basic 
differential feature of the sentence, but not the only one. There is a 
profound difference between the nominative function of the word 
and the nominative function of the sentence. The nominative 
content of a syntagmatically complete average sentence, called a 
proposition, reflects a processual situation, an event that includes 

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a certain process (actional or statal) as its dynamic center, the 
agent of the process, the objects of the process, and various 
conditions and circumstances of the realization of the process. The 
situation, together with its various elements, is reflected through 
the nominative parts (members) of the sentence, distinguished in 
the traditional grammatical or syntactic division of the sentence, 
which can also be defined as its nominative division. No separate 
word, no matter how many stems it consists of, c an express the 
situation-nominative semantics of a proposition.
4. Actual division of the sentence. 
As has been mentioned, besides the nominative aspect of 
the semantics of the sentence, which reflects the situation named 
with its various components, the sentence expresses predicative 
semantics, which reflects various relations between the 
nominative content of the sentence and reality. One of the first 
attempts to analyze communicative semantics of the sentence was 
undertaken by the scholars of the Prague Lingistic Circle at the 
beginning of the 20th century. The Czech linguist Vilém 
Mathesius was the first to describe the informative value of 
different parts of the sentence in the actual process of 
communication, making the informative perspective of an 
utterance and showing which component of the denoted situation 
is informationally more important from the point of view of the 
speaker [22, p. 224]. By analogy with the grammatical, or 
nominative division of the sentence the idea of the so-called 
―actual division‖ of the sentence was put forward. This linguistic 
theory is known as the functional analysis, the communicative 
analysis, the actual division analysis, or the informative 
perspective analysis. 
The main components of the actual division of a sentence
are the the me and the rhe me. The theme (originally called ―the 

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basis‖ by V. Mathesius) is the starting point of communication, a 
thing or a phenomenon about which something is reported in the 
sentence; it usually contains some old, ―already known‖ 
information. The rheme (originally called ―the nucleus‖ by 
V. Mathesius) is the basic informative part of the sentence, its 
contextually relevant communicative center, the ―peak‖ of 
communication, or the information reported about the theme; it 
usually contains some new information. There may be transitional