A Corpus-Based Study of Hypotactic and Paratactic Thematic Relations in English and Urdu Clause Complexes

Abstract

The present research inquires the paratactic and hypotactic thematic relations in terms of their grammatical realization, functional significance (Halliday, 1994) and thematic progression (McCabe, 1999). In the paratactic clause complexes, two or more independent clauses are joined by the coordinating conjunctions while in the hypotactic clause complexes, two or more independent and dependent clauses are joined by the subordinating conjunctions. The specific objectives of this research are: (1) to define the grammatical realization of paratactic and hypotactic thematic structures in the English and the Urdu texts, (2) to describe the functional significance of paratactic and hypotactic thematic structures particular to information flow and thematic progression in the English and the Urdu texts, and (3) to discuss how effectively the paratactic and hypotactic thematic structures in the English text have been translated into the Urdu text. The English text, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and its translated Urdu text, Bikharti Duniya by Ikram Ullah have been selected for this study. These texts have been annotated through the annotation scheme of UAM Corpus Tool (O’Donnell, 2008). The results reveal that the Urdu text uses multiple equivalents of conjunction either paratactic or hypotactic in the English text. Thematic progression patterns in both texts are mostly constant, linear and peripheral. The unmotivated displacement of paratactic and hypotactic themes causes ambiguity and change the information flow in the Urdu text. The present research is significant to support the systemic functional grammar of Urdu taking into account of English.