Visualizing texts : a tool for generating thematic-progression diagrams

• Main Author: Leong, Alvin Ping
• Other Authors: School of Humanities
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: Humanities::Language; Hallidayan Framework; Language
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/145499
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The Hallidayan notion of Theme, first presented in a series of seminal papers in the 1960s (Halliday 1967, 1968), is a central component of the message structure of the clause, and forms part of a larger social-functional theory of language. The theory regards the functions of language as primary and accounts for how language both acts upon and is constrained by the social context in which it functions (Halliday 1973; Halliday and Hasan 1985). These contexts are stated in terms of language metafunctions—the ideational (comprising experiential and logical), interpersonal, and textual. While the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions construe our experiences of the world and establish interpersonal relations between or among the discourse participants, the textual metafunction packages such experiences and interpersonal relations so that they can be meaningfully conveyed through language. The textual metafunction, to which Theme belongs, thus performs a facilitating or enabling role, allowing for the message in the clause, and by extension the larger text, to be ordered and developed.