Communicative Syntax. It is primarily concerned with the analysis of utterances from the point of their communicative value and informative structure. It deals with the actual division of the utterance – the theme and rheme analysis. Both the theme and the rheme constitute the informative structure of utterances. The theme is something that is known already while the rheme represents some new information. Depending on the contextual informative value any sentence element can act as the theme or the rheme: Who is at home? - John is at home. Where is John? – John is at home.
Syntactic unit is always a combination that has at least two constituents. The basic syntactic units are a word-group, a clause, a sentence, and a text. Their main features are:
they are hierarchical units – the units of a lower level serve the building material for the units of a higher level;
c) they are of communicative and non-communicative nature – word-groups
and clauses are of non-communicative nature while sentences and texts
are of communicative nature.