Tour Page 10 - Theme-based Patterns

Themes are a good way to display information within a clause. While the grammatical display can swap the elements for the subject and object (as in the case for passive verbs), a thematic system identifies the elements the same way, regardless of grammatical position.

To illustrate this, the meaning of "The boy hits the girl" is grammtically different from "the girl is hit by the boy" but seems to mean the same thing. In both sentences, however, the thematic elements are the same.

He shot the old men with a gun.

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This example shows the theme elements of the sentence. The theme itself is shown as "he". The verb is "shot". The patient, the thing that was shot, is "the old men". And the instrument that does the shooting, is "the gun".