Word order in Russian: theme and rheme

Did you know that in Russian we put the known information in the beginning of the sentence (that is “theme”) and the new one at the end (“rheme”)?

In the previous Russian Tip we talked about neutral and emotive word orders. Now we are going to look at the sentences that have only rheme.

Падает снег. Snow is falling.

In the sentence like the one above there is only new information (rheme). Typical word order for these sentences is Verb – Subject; and they are used to answer the quiestions like:

Что случилось? What happened?

Что происходит? What is going on?