Kuno's direct discourse analysis is rejected, after which it is argued that (i) the concepts of theme and rheme have relevance to Kuno's data and lots of other data as well, and that (ii) transformations may not apply in the same sentence to achieve antagonistic purposes in terms of the theme-rheme distinction (i.e. if one transformation applies to indicate that a certain element is the theme, no other transformation may be used to indicate that it is the rheme).