Mistaking Rheme For New Information

Martin & Rose (2007: 192):

At the other end of the clause in writing we typically have what Halliday calls New. This is a different kind of textual prominence having to do with the information we are expanding upon as text unfolds. In the phase of discourse we are concentrating on here, the News have to do with how Helena's husband felt and so the dominant pattern has to do with negative appraisal (depressed mental states and strange behaviour). Note how the choices for New are much more varied than the choices for unmarked Theme.They elaborate with human human interest, whereas choices for unmarked Theme tend to fix our gaze.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this confuses Rheme with New. On the one hand, Rheme is the element of clause structure in which the Theme is developed (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014: 89). On the other hand, New is not an element of clause structure, but an element of the structure of an information unit, which can

• be co-extensive with a clause,
• extend over a portion of a clause, or
• extend further than a clause.

Moreover, New information can occur in either the Theme or the Rheme of a clause; that is, New is not restricted to the Rheme. Examples of the conflation of New with Theme in Martin & Rose's data include the marked Themes. Each of these is punctuated graphologically by a comma, which marks the extent of the Theme as an information unit, which obligatorily includes a focus of New information. Given that the marked Themes in Helena's texts are restricted to circumstances of temporal Location which introduce each new time-phase in her autobiography, it is not surprising that each of these marked Themes presents the temporal Location as New information.

[2] It will be seen in the next post that Martin & Rose's analysis of New information (and unmarked Theme) is markedly different from an analysis based on SFL principles — not only because New is ignored when thematic.