Theme in Text : Weighing the Evidence

ISBN-13: 9783639132151 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 248 str.

Peter Crompton

Opis

A distinctive and controversial feature ofSystemic-Functional Grammar, as theorised by MichaelHalliday, has been its analysis of formal units intoTheme and Rheme. It has been argued that the functionof sentence Themes is to expound the organisingprinciple, or method of development, of a text ortext-segment. This book reviews that claim and setsout to test it empirically by examining sentenceThemes in a corpus of 80 short argumentative texts byauthors of four differing levels of linguistic andrhetorical competence. Evidence for semanticpatterning in Theme is considered and compared withevidence for comparable patterning in Rheme andSubject. The research also investigates interactionbetween Theme and other formal features of textassociated with discourse organisation, such asdefiniteness, lexical cohesion, retrospectivelabelling, prospection, and adverbial clauses withextended discourse scope. The author concludes thereis little evidence that Theme has a privileged rolein expounding text structure. The book will appeal tothose interested in functional theories of grammar,corpus-based approaches to written text analysis, andcomposition instruction.

O autorze

Peter Crompton holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of
Lancaster, in the United Kingdom. He has taught English and
applied linguistics in Europe, the Far East, South East Asia, and
the Middle East. He is Assistant Professor in the
Department of English, American University of Sharjah, United
Arab Emirates.