Texture - the quality that makes a text 'hang together' as a text - is a key focus of investigation in discourse analysis. This volume provides a systematic overview of recent research on textual resources that are used to construct texture, and on the ways in which these resources are deployed differently in different text types. Theme is the major resource that is explored in the first part of this book. The opening papers set out the current understanding of Theme and explore aspects of the concept that remain controversial in the field. This is followed by an examination of thematic...

This book is the first to combine interests in two currently popular approaches to language description, both of which are based on the observation of naturally-occurring as opposed to invented, language. Systemic Functional Linguistics is a theory that focuses on meaning, choice and probability in language and on language as a social phenomenon. Corpus Linguistics is a practice, rather than a theory: a corpus is a large collection of texts that are used as the basis for language description. It is natural that SFL should turn to corpora as a source of information about grammatical...