Crompton, P: Theme in Text

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.