Martin & Rose (2007: 196-7):
The following examples of history writing display a similar kind of sandwich structure, with hyperThemes predicting what’s to come, and hyperNews distilling what’s been said (the ‘you tell them what you’re going to say, say it, and tell them what you’ve said’ rhetoric noted above). For both of these texts note just how precisely the hyperTheme predicts the pattern of Themes which follow (underlined), and the hyperNew consolidates the pattern of News which precede it:
The Second World War further encouraged the restructuring of the Australian economy towards a manufacturing basis.
Between 1937 and 1945 the value of industrial production almost doubled. This increase was faster than otherwise would have occurred. The momentum was maintained in the post-war years and by 1954-5 the value of manufacturing output was three times that of 1944-5. The enlargement of Australia's steel-makinq capacity, and of chemicals, rubber, metal goods and motor vehicles all owed something to the demands of war.
The war had acted as something of a hot-house for technological progress and economic change.
For one thousand years, whales have been of commercial interest for meat, oil, meal and whalebone.
About 1000 A.D., whaling started with the Basques using sailing vessels and row boats. They concentrated on the slow-moving Right whales. As whaling spread to other countries, whaling shifted to Humpbacks, Greys, Sperms and Bowheads. By 1500, they were whaling off Greenland; by the 1700s, off Atlantic America; and by the 1800s, in the south Pacific, Antarctic and Bering Sea. Early in this century, the Norwegians introduced explosive harpoons, fired from guns on catcher boats, and whaling shifted to the larger and faster baleen whales. The introduction of factory ships by Japan and the USSR intensified whaling still further.
The global picture, then, was a mining operation moving progressively with increasing efficiency to new species and new areas. Whaling reached a peak during the present century.
Both hyperNews include evaluative metaphors, a not untypical feature of higher level News in writing of this kind. Patterns of clause Themes have been described as constructing a text’s ‘method of development’; patterns of News establish its ‘point’ (Fries 1981).
Blogger Comments:
[1] To be clear, the topic sentences (hyperThemes) in these two texts do not predict 'what's to come'. The reader is invited to predict 'what's to come' only on the basis of the topic sentences, without the benefit of hindsight. What is true is that the bodies of these two texts elaborate the meaning of their respective topic sentences, the first through exemplification, the second through exposition. Martin & Rose here mistake logico-semantic relations in textual transitions for textual statuses.
[2] To be clear, the relation of the paragraph summaries (hyperNews) to the bodies of their respective texts is elaboration through summation. Martin & Rose here again mistake logico-semantic relations in textual transitions for textual status.
[3] To be clear, misanalyses of Theme are marked in red. Those that are underlined are Subjects that have been displaced from Theme by Adjuncts (marked Themes), and so feature in the Rheme, not Theme. Those that are not underlined are Themes that Martin & Rose missed in their analysis.
[4] To be clear, the pattern of New information is not indicated. As previously demonstrated, Martin & Rose mistake Rheme for New information. New information can occur in both Theme or Rheme, or neither.
[5] This is true. It was Fries (1981), not Martin (1992), who first theorised 'method of development' and 'point'. In SFL Theory, these are now seen as logogenetic patterns of instantiation.
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