Misrepresenting The Thematic Selections Of A Text

Martin & Rose (2007: 189-90, 218n):

The notion of waves of information has been an important part of functional linguistics, in the work for example of the Prague school on communicative dynamism, in the 1930s, and in SFL since the 1960's. Halliday treats the clause itself, from the point of view of textual meaning, as a wave of information. The peak of prominence at the beginning of the clause is referred to as its Theme.

To do a Theme analysis we take a phase of discourse and divide it into clauses; let's use Helena's description of her husband's agony as an example here.

Since we're working on discourse, we need to fill in the participants that have been ellipsed, as their identities are part of the listener/reader's expectations. We'll show these ellipsed participants in square brackets, together with the ellipsed verbal elements they are associated with…

He became very quiet.
[He became] Withdrawn.
Sometimes he would just press his face into his hands
and [he would] shake uncontrollably.
I realised
he was drinking too much.
Instead of resting at night, he would wander from window to window.
He tried to hide his wild consuming fear,
but I saw it.
In the early hours of the morning between two and half-past-two, I jolt awake from his rushed breathing.
[He] Rolls this way, that side of the bed.
He's pale.
[He's] ice cold in a sweltering night
[He's] — sopping wet with sweat.
[His] Eyes [are] bewildered,
but [his eyes are] dull like the dead.
And [he had] the shakes.
[He had] The terrible convulsions and blood-curdling shrieks of fear and pain from the bottom of his soul.
Sometimes he sits motionless,
just staring in front of him.

It's sometimes difficult to know how much to fill in; we've given a pretty rich reading above, filling all the 'holes' except the one in the last non-finite clause (just staring in front of him).¹ Filling in gives us a richer text to work with from the point of view of Theme analysis.

¹ Non-finite clauses are omitted from a Theme analysis because one reason they’re non-finite is to take them out of the mainstream of information flow in a phase of discourse.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading, because it includes three untruths:

• The notion of waves of information has never been proposed by the Prague School;
• communicative dynamism is part of Functional Sentence Perspective, which was first developed by Firbas (1921-2000) in the 1950s, not the 1930s; and
• the notion of waves of information in SFL first appeared in the 1980s, not the 1960s.

[2] To be clear, in "filling in" the ellipsed clause elements, Martin & Rose have rejected the textual selections of the writer (Helena) and replaced them with their own. This is particularly problematic because the absence of elements through ellipsis marks lack of textual prominence, whereas the reinstatement of these elements as Themes by Martin & Rose misrepresents them as textually prominent. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 635):

Ellipsis thus assigns differential prominence to the elements of a structure: if they are non-prominent (continuous), they are ellipsed; if they are prominent (contrastive), they are present. The absence of elements through ellipsis is an iconic realisation of lack of prominence.

[3] This is a bare assertion, unsupported by argumentation based on evidence. Clearly, even non-finite clauses without a Theme contribute to the information flow — "mainstream" or otherwise — of a text, if only because the Rheme is an element of information, constituting the body of the clause as message. However, non-finite clauses can include both structural and topical Themes, and to ignore these is to misrepresent the information flow of a text. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 127):

If non-finite, there may be a conjunction or preposition as structural Theme, which may be followed by a Subject as topical Theme; but many non-finite clauses have neither, in which case they consist of Rheme only.

It is likely that Martin & Rose have confused information flow (textual metafunction) with negotiability (interpersonal metafunction), since non-finite clauses are the least negotiable. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 172):

Non-finite clauses are even further removed from the status of negotiability than finite ones.

This type of metafunctional confusion will be seen in later posts where Martin & Rose fail to distinguish Theme (textual metafunction) from Subject (interpersonal metafunction).