Semantic versus Pragmatic Identification of Thematic Information in Discourse
Semantic versus Pragmatic Identification of Thematic Information in Discourse

Summary/Abstract: The identification of thematic information in a text helps to establish the links between Themes and Rhemes and implicitly to account for the coherence and cohesion of the text. Existing syntactic theories used for the identification of thematic information fail when it comes to establishing the length of Themes at sentence level and to justifying the logical links between Themes and Rhemes. The paper hypothesizes that a model based on pragmatic components can lead to a more accurate identification of thematic information in a text and tests this hypothesis in a comparative analysis of a text using both the syntactic and the pragmatic approaches.

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