Abstract
This article will attempt to study the differences in the thematic/topical progression of two subgenres, news items and tourist brochures. The general hypothesis proposed for this research is that the news items and tourist brochures should, according to the characteristics of genre and register, show a significant difference in the location of the topical elements in the clause structure and in their topical and thematic organization. After adopting the Hallidayan notion of theme (1985, 1994) as the point of departure of the message, the concept of topic has been defined from the aboutness perspective - following van Dijk (1977, 1981a, 1981b), van Oosten (1985) and Downing (1997) - as the entity, proposition, or main idea which a sentence, a stretch of discourse, or a discourse in its global sense is about. The empirical analysis of the sample of 40 texts verifies, to some extent, the hypothesis outlined. The persuasive function of the tourist brochure frequently leads the writer to move the new topical entities further away from the sentence-initial position so that the introduction of the topic is postponed and the reader's attention is fully attracted to the area being advertised. In news items, however, the local topics tend to be located in thematic position without further introduction.
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