Analysing Theme: Berry Appraoch
1. Use a table with 4 columns:
Conj
and
Adjunct
in the end
Theme
she
Rheme
was not there.
2. Don’t analyse the theme of embedded clauses (unless you want to)
Conj
Adjunct
Theme
Camilla
Rheme
can't become Queen because she's not legally
married to Charles
3. Do analyse paratactically connected main clauses:
Conj
Adjunct
Theme
The Mona Lisa
it
and
Rheme
is currently owned by the Government of France
is on display at the Musée du Louvre in Paris
4. Where the subject is elided, insert it in parentheses, and treat it as theme:
Conj
Adjunct
Theme
The Mona Lisa
(it)
and
Rheme
is currently owned by the Government of France
is on display at the Musée du Louvre in Paris
5. Imperatives are special, treat the verb as theme:
Conj
and
Adjunct
Just before the end of
the street,
Theme
Turn
stop
Rheme
left at the corner
your car.
6. You might want to indicate the where the theme has come from:
 Constant theme
 Linear Theme
(Digression)
 Theme Return
 Derived theme
Repeats the theme from the previous sentence.
The Theme occurred in the previous Rheme
A previous theme is restored after a digression, or after a
derived theme.
The new theme is a related aspect of the previous theme (or
rheme) (She -> Her mother)
7. Where an adjunct is fronted with Subject-finite inversion, this is a very marked
theme, and could be treated as a “basic theme” rather than an additional theme:
Conj
Adjunct
Into the valley of
death
Theme
Into the valley of death
Never
the 500
Rheme
marched the 500.
have I seen such an ado.
marched.
8. Text in quotation marks (direct speech) is really part of its own text (its ‘author’ is the
speaker of that text, not the writer of the text as a whole. For this reason, it may be
best to treat all of the quoted speech as Rheme. Long direct speeches might even be
analysed as an independent text.
EXERCISE: Analyse the following text in terms of theme using Berry’s model
Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor wood-cutter with his wife and his two children.
The boy was called Hansel and the girl Gretel. He had little to bite and to break, and
once, when great dearth fell on the land, he could no longer procure even daily
bread.
Now when he thought over this by night in his bed, and tossed about in his anxiety,
he groaned and said to his wife, "What is to become of us? How are we to feed our
poor children, when we no longer have anything even for ourselves?"
"I'll tell you what, husband," answered the woman, "early tomorrow morning we will
take the children out into the forest to where it is the thickest. There we will light a
fire for them, and give each of them one more piece of bread, and then we will go
to our work and leave them alone. They will not find the way home again, and we
shall be rid of them."
Adjuncts
Conj
Theme
Rheme