Abstract
Summary This paper intends to prove that the recurrent use of predicated themes in the novels written by the South African writer Alan Paton has certain communicative implications, since they are appropriate to express feelings, and to highlight information in situations of climax in the novels under analysis. The analysis of this syntactic structure in context will point out that predicated themes allow the writer to be conscious that he is asserting or denying something in a firm way; the predicated theme is also an important structure for the textual organisation of discourse. The linguistic framework for this paper is systemic functional linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004), a linguistic school that establishes a clear link between lexicogrammatical choices in the text, and the relevant contextual factors surrounding it. Systemic linguistics explores how linguistic choices are related to the meanings that are being expressed.
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