The Realizations of Point of Departure of Message in General English Texts

Seyed Foad Ebrahimi

doi:10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.6n.6p.40

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the realization of marked and unmarked theme types as point of departure of message in general English texts. The corpus of this study was 15 general English texts extracted from English general textbooks for university students published in Iran and taught at universities in Iran. The corpus was analyzed based on Halliday’s (1985) framework of thematic organization. Findings suggested the unmarked theme was predominant compared to marked theme. This is due to that writers prefer to use simple structure that help readers to get a better comprehension. Findings also showed that different types of marked theme were used to help in text organization and contribute to better comprehension. In such cases, the writers felt the need to mention some elements in the thematic position other than grammatical subject. The findings highlighted that general English instructors and developers need to take on board the notion of theme and its importance in teaching and developing general English texts.

Highlights

Academic written and spoken discourses have been studied in the last two decades for the rhetorical structures and linguistic features
This is in line with findings reported in Ebrahimi and Chan (2013) and Ebrahimi (2016 a). This similarity might suggest that disregarding the academic genre of analysis, writers in academic texts prefer to use topical unmarked theme in the thematic position. Such a use could be discussed based on the fact that in academic texts, writers prefer to use simple structures and to develop texts that follow the simple structure of sentence in English at which sentences are started by grammatical subject at the thematic position followed by verbs
This study aimed to investigate the realizations of marked and unmarked theme in general English textbooks taught at Iranian universities

Summary

Introduction

Academic written and spoken discourses have been studied in the last two decades for the rhetorical structures and linguistic features. 30) defines theme “as an element which serves as the point of departure of the message and what the speaker has in mind to start with. It is the element in a particular structural configuration taken as whole, and it organizes the clause as a message. In the same line, Brown and Yule (1983) stated that one of the constraints on the speakers /writers is that they can produce only one word at a time when they are producing their messages They have to choose a beginning point for their utterances in order to organize their messages.

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