Surfing Through Waves Of HyperTheme And HyperNew

Martin & Rose (2007: 195-6):

As a general rule, writing looks forward more often than it looks back. So hyperThemes are more common than hyperNews; there’s more ‘prospect’ than ‘retrospect’. But examples of higher level News are not hard to find. Here are two examples from Mandela’s summary of his life at the end of his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom (we’ll return to this text in Chapter 8). Both examples include a hyperTheme, complementing the consolidating hyperNew (in bold):

But then I slowly saw that not only was I not free, but my brothers and sisters were not free, I saw that it was not just my freedom that was curtailed, but the freedom of everyone who looked like I did.

That is when I joined the African National Congress, and that is when the hunger for my own freedom became the greater hunger for the freedom of my people. It was this desire for the freedom of my people to live their lives with dignity and self-respect that animated my life, that transformed a frightened young man into a bold one, that drove a law-abiding attorney to become a criminal, that turned a family-loving husband into a man without a home, that forced a life-loving man to live like a monk. I am no more virtuous or self-sacrificing than the next man, but I found that I could not even enjoy the poor and limited freedoms I was allowed when I knew my people were not free.

Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.

When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both. Some say that has now been achieved. But I know that this is not the case.

The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.

In general terms, the hyperTheme is paraphrased by the body of the paragraph, which is in turn paraphrased by the hyperNew. But the hyperNew is never an exact paraphrase of the hyperTheme, nor is it simply a summary of the wave’s trough; it takes the text to a new point, which we could only get to by surfing through the waves.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, if this bare assertion is true, it merely means that writers who conform to these pedagogical principles use topic sentences (hyperThemes) more than paragraph summaries (hyperNews).

[2] To be clear, paragraph summaries (hyperNews) are "hard to find" in spoken language. The reader is invited to falsify this claim.

[3] To be clear, if a topic sentence (hyperTheme) is paraphrased by the body of the paragraph and this is paraphrased the paragraph summary (hyperNew), then there is no meaningful distinction between the three in terms of thematicity or newness. But, in any case, an examination of the two texts demonstrates that the three segments in each case are not paraphrases of each other.

More importantly, this has less to do with textual prominence than textual transitions through logico-semantic relations. For example, on this description, the body of a paragraph elaborates the topic sentence (hyperTheme) through (appositive) exemplification, while the paragraph summary (hyperNew) elaborates the body of the paragraph through (clarifying) summation; see Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 612-6). 

[4] To be clear, anyone trying to surf through waves has misunderstood the notion of surfing, also.