Thirdly, constituency representation is also poorly adapted to textual meaning, which tends to structure clauses and groups in such a way as to highlight first and last position. The English clause for example uses first position to highlight the speaker's angle on the experience being constructed while last position is hearer oriented, highlighting information that is in some respect new. The systems of THEME and INFORMATION can thus be seen as assigning peaks of prominence to the beginning and end of the English clause; this textual patterning assigns a periodic texture to English discourse as it unfolds. Halliday's analysis of THEME and INFORMATION structure is presented in Fig. 1.7, followed by a more iconic form of representation highlighting clause texture as a rhythmic pulse.
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[1] As Halliday (1985: 169) explains:
The textual meaning of the clause is expressed by what is put first (the Theme); by what is phonologically prominent (and tends to be put last – the New, signalled by information focus); and by conjunctions and relatives which if present must occur in initial position. Thus it forms a wave-like pattern of periodicity that is set up by peaks of prominence and boundary markers.
Importantly, INFORMATION is not a system of the clause, and an information unit only coincides with the clause in the unmarked case. Moreover, in these unmarked cases, the New only occurs last in the unmarked case. The New can occur anywhere in the clause, or not at all (as is the case of the first clause in He said he didn't know).
As will be seen, Martin falsely assumes that New information always occurs in the Rheme of a clause, which is one of the factors that undermines his model.
[2] To be clear, the term 'texture' has a specific meaning in SFL Theory: the property of being a text, which is derived 'from the fact that it functions as a unity with respect to its environment' (Halliday & Hasan 1976: 2).
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