Introducing New Information into the Context of Discourse

The introduction of new (context-independent, irretrievable) information into the context of discourse is usually associated with the rheme/focus of a sentence, while the theme/topic is understood as a carrier of old (context-dependent, retrievable) information. Within the concept of the immediately relevant context defined by Firbas and applied by the Brno theory of functional sentence perspective, however, certain types of thematic elements are interpreted as irretrievable, i.e. new. Different carriers of new information (depending on whether they are rhematic or thematic) thus carry different degrees of communicative dynamism and different degrees of prosodic prominence. The paper explores the ways in which new information is introduced into the context of discourse, and analyzes the differences between new information within the theme and new information within the rheme of a sentence.