Thursday 10 March 2016

Problems With The Complementarity Of Hyper-Theme & Hyper-New

Martin (1992: 454):
This complementarity of hyper-Theme predicting a text's method of development and hyper-New accumulating its point is outlined in Fig. 6.11.

 
Fig. 6.11. Complementarity of hyper-Theme & hyper-New


Blogger Comments:

[1] This is potentially misleading, to the extent that it represents Theme and New as always distinct.

[2] As previously explained, a hyper-Theme — Martin's rebranding of Topic Sentence, using a term coined for other purposes by Daneš (1974) — does not "predict" what experiential content will be highlighted in subsequent Themes.

Any relations between the experiential content of Topic Sentences and the experiential content of subsequent Themes are those of lexical cohesion and grammatical reference, two non-structural resources of the textual metafunction.