HyperTheme: Writing Pedagogy Misrepresented As Linguistic Theory

Martin & Rose (2007: 194):

As noted at the beginning of this chapter Helena introduces the phase of discourse we’ve just been considering as ‘living hell’, and she does so with a marked Theme

After about three years with the special forces, our hell began.

Her evaluation of their life as our hell functions as a kind of ‘topic sentence' for the events which follow as she spells out what hell is. From a linguistic perspective we can treat this ‘topic sentence’ as a kind of higher level Theme: a hyperTheme. In doing so we’re saying that its relation to the text which follows is like the relation of a clause Theme to the rest of its clause. In both contexts the Theme gives us an orientation to what is to come: our frame of reference as it were. Beyond this, the hyperTheme is predictive; it establishes expectations about how the text will unfold.

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[1] To be clear, like the term 'topic sentence' itself, this is writing pedagogy, not linguistic theory, because it is a proposal about how to write, not a proposition about how to model language.

[2] To be clear, the term 'hypertheme' is from Daneš (1974), where it refers to the first appearance of a repeated Theme ('hyper' in the sense of 'above' the second appearance). For clarifying critiques of Martin's use of 'hypertheme', see the series of posts here.