"Marked Themes Are Often Used To Signal A Shift In Major Participants"

 Martin & Rose (2007: 191-2):

Themes that are not Subject have a different effect; they are more prominent because they are atypical, so we refer to them as 'marked' Themes. Marked Themes can include circumstantial elements, such as places or times, or they may be participants that are not the Subject of the clause. Marked Themes are often used to signal new phases in a discourse: a new setting in time, or a shift in major participants; that is they function to scaffold discontinuity.

In Helena's story, marked Themes play an important role in moving us from one phase of the story to the next. The story's key marked Themes are outlined below. We can see the role they play in moving us from Incident to Incident and from Incidents to Interpretation; and the role they play with Incidents to frame the meeting, operations and repercussion phases. These are underlined below:

Incident 1

As an eighteen-year-old, I met a young man in his twenties
Then one day he said he was going on a 'trip'
More than a year ago, I met my first love again through a good friend

Incident 2

After my unsuccessful marriage, I met another policeman
[Then he says: He and three of our friends have been promoted]
After about three years in the special forces, our hell began

Interpretation

Today I know the answer to all my questions and heartache

Blogger Comments:

[1] Again, this confuses markedness with prominence. All Themes are textually prominent, but marked Themes typically carry an added feature of contrast (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 105).

[2] To be clear, participants that are not the Subject of a clause, Complements, are very rarely thematic in declarative clauses; examples include now that I like and lobsters I never eat. There are no instances of Complement/Themes in any of the texts analysed by Martin & Rose, and the claim that marked Themes are used to signal a shift in major participants is, at best, unsupported by evidence.

[3] To be clear, here Martin & Rose have borrowed and misused a linguistic term introduced by Vygotsky, who defined scaffolding instruction as the role of teachers and others in supporting the learner's development and providing support structures to get to that next stage or level. The theoretical notion of "scaffolding discontinuity" is thus nonsensical.

[4] To be clear, Helena's story is a temporally ordered autobiography, and she simply thematises temporal circumstances of Location to introduce each time period.