A Pragmatic Concept Of Theme And Rheme For Machine Translation

The concept of theme and rheme we want to propose in this paper is pragmatic in two senses of the wordz the theme/ theme structure (TRS) is viewed as a strategy of communication and thus belongs to pra~natics, and it seems to offer a pragmatic solution for a problem of machine translation. The starting-point of our considerations is defined by several arEuments claiming the ne@essity to preserve the TRS of sentences (or utterances) in the process of translation, as stated in Koenitz, 1978z-the exhaustive-listing reading of the theme-the presuppositionsl character of the theme-the connexion of the THS with the degree of textual coherence. the correlation of themeness and definiteness-general considerations in a framework of communication theory (readability of texts eto.) Further arguments might easily be added to this list (e.g. the relation between the TR3 and the scope of operators). In principle all of them hold for machine translation as well, at least if it is pursued within a theoretical fremework, as e.g. in the case of the project SALAT (of. Hauensohild, 1978) and of the successor project "Ubersetzungsbezogene Kontext-theorie" (Context theory for translation) in the spirit of which this paper was written.