The incidence and effects on coherence of marked themes in interlanguage texts: a corpus-based enquiry

Abstract

Chinese writers of academic texts in English demonstrate a clear tendency to place in sentence-initial position certain topic-fronting devices (beginning For and Concerning), and logical connectors ( Besides, Furthermore and Moreover) to introduce new information. When fronted in this way, these items usurp the position of the information structure element referred to in systemic-functional linguistics as theme. Theme functions in discourse to convey given or known information, but when theme position is occupied by new information, that information may constitute a marked theme. To establish empirically that Chinese subjects utilise theme position in the way described, a non-native speaker (NNS) corpus of academic writing produced by Chinese subjects was tagged to detect occurrences of the two topic-fronting devices and the three thematised connectors. The same phenomena were similarly investigated in three native-speaker (NS) corpora. The findings demonstrate that Chinese subjects do have a greater tendency than native speakers to place the connectors under consideration in theme position, but the findings are less clear for the topic-fronting devices. This empirical study was followed by an exercise in which texts containing marked themes were analysed to determine the effects of the markedness on information structure. It was found that inappropriate occupation of theme position by the items under consideration here has a deleterious effect on information structure and that this, in turn, has negative effects on both local and global text coherence.