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Theme in Text. Edition No. 1
VDM Publishing House, March 2009, Pages: 248
A distinctive and controversial feature of
Systemic-Functional Grammar, as theorised by Michael
Halliday, has been its analysis of formal units into
Theme and Rheme. It has been argued that the function
of sentence Themes is to expound the organising
principle, or ‘method of development,’ of a text or
text-segment. This book reviews that claim and sets
out to test it empirically by examining sentence
Themes in a corpus of 80 short argumentative texts by
authors of four differing levels of linguistic and
rhetorical competence. Evidence for semantic
patterning in Theme is considered and compared with
evidence for comparable patterning in Rheme and
Subject. The research also investigates interaction
between Theme and other formal features of text
associated with discourse organisation, such as
definiteness, lexical cohesion, retrospective
labelling, prospection, and adverbial clauses with
extended discourse scope. The author concludes there
is little evidence that Theme has a privileged role
in expounding text structure. The book will appeal to
those interested in functional theories of grammar,
corpus-based approaches to written text analysis, and
composition instruction.
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