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Having looked at the clause from the perspective of what interaction is being carried out and what is being talked about, we will now turn to examining aspects that can only be fully understood by looking at the clause in its context in the rest of the language around it.

When we look at language from the point of view of the textual metafunction, we are trying to see how speakers construct their messages in a way that makes them fi t smoothly into the unfolding language event (which may be a conversation, or a newspaper article, for example). As well as interacting with their listeners and saying something to them about the world, speakers constantly organize the way their message is worded in order to signal to them how the present part of their message fi ts in with other parts. To get an idea of this, look at the following example from a letter appealing for money for the SOU, an organization that tries to prevent cruelty to animals:

You probably haven’t heard of the SOU before. That’s because we fi ght cruelty undercover.

There are a number of signals in the second sentence here that it functions as a coherent continuation of the fi rst: ‘that’ encapsulates the whole of the information given in the fi rst sentence, while ‘because’ signals the logical relationship of result and reason between the new information in the second sentence and the information in the fi rst. Less obviously, perhaps, the placing of ‘that’ in initial position makes the second sentence fi t more smoothly (if you change the order of the constituents around the eff ect sounds awkward – e.g. ‘The fact that we fi ght cruelty undercover is the reason for that’). What we have identifi ed here are three of the main ways in

which textual meanings are constructed in a text: repetition, conjunction and thematization.

Repetition, as I am using the term, clearly includes repetition of the same word or a synonym – in the letter from which the example is taken, ‘the SOU’ is repeated three times in the fi rst four paragraphs. This is usually called ‘lexical repetition’.

However, it also includes more ‘grammatical’ kinds of repetition of meaning, which may not be expressed by the same or similar wording – in the example, ‘that’ brings into its sentence the meaning of the whole previous sentence. The function of repetition is typically to show that parts of a text (not necessarily adjacent to each other) are related in some way. By repeating a wording or a meaning, speakers signal that they are keeping to the same topic, whereas an absence of repetition might make it diffi cult for the hearers to understand that they are.

While repetition typically signals that parts of a text are related, it is the function of conjunction to show how they are related. This is clearest when a conjunction such as ‘because’ is used to relate two clauses:

You probably haven’t heard of the SOU before, because we fi ght cruelty undercover.

Conjunctive Adjuncts such as ‘therefore’, and certain kinds of nouns (see Winter, 1982) such as ‘the reason’ can also perform the same kind of function, though in diff erent ways.

Conjunction obviously works primarily between two or more clauses. So, too, does repetition, since it plays a crucial role when a speaker chooses to express certain elements of one clause in a way that recalls the elements of earlier clauses.

Thematization is diff erent in that it relates not to the way that individual components are expressed but to the structuring of the clause itself – the order in which elements appear in the clause. The Theme of a clause is simply the fi rst constituent of the clause. In choosing the starting point for a clause – the constituent that appears in fi rst position – cooperative speakers select something that will make it easier for their hearers to ‘hook’ this clause onto the earlier clauses, to see immediately how the information that will come in the remainder of the clause is likely to fi t in with what has already been said.

This section on textual meanings is split over two chapters, to make it more manageable. In this fi rst part, Chapter 6, we will be dealing with Theme. Chapter 7 will be a kind of interlude, in which I look at conjunction in terms of the grammatical resources that enable clauses to get combined into complexes/sentences. In Chapter 8, I will then move beyond the limits of the clause complex for the second chapter on textual meanings. That will focus on an outline of grammatical kinds of repetition between complexes/sentences. (We will not be looking in detail at lexical repetition, since that would take us beyond what is traditionally accepted as grammar.) I will also come back to conjunction as a broader phenomenon, from the particular perspective of its role in establishing relations between complexes/sentences.

6.2 Theme

The following example is the fi rst sentence of a newspaper report of an exhibition on industrial history:

For centuries, yellow canaries have been used to ‘test’ the air in mining.

The fi rst clause constituent in this case (which is in italics) is an Adjunct. Without changing the wording too much, we can reorder the components of this sentence in a number of diff erent ways:

Yellow canaries have been used to ‘test’ the air in mining for centuries.

Miners have used yellow canaries to ‘test’ the air for centuries.

In mining, yellow canaries have been used to ‘test’ the air for centuries.

To ‘test’ the air in mining, yellow canaries have been used for centuries.

The air has been ‘tested’ in mining for centuries by using yellow canaries.

What we have done in each case is to start the message from a diff erent point – that is, to choose a diff erent Theme for the clause. As mentioned above, the Theme is the fi rst constituent of the clause. All the rest of the clause is simply labelled the Rheme. You might like to think about what the eff ects of changing the starting points are, and in what context each might be appropriate.

The original sentence starts from the historical perspective – ‘For centuries’ – which makes sense since the theme of the exhibition is industrial history and this is the opening sentence of the article. Both ‘Yellow canaries’ and ‘Miners’ could work as Theme in the context, but they might be read as indicating that canaries or miners will be the main topic of the article rather than just an example of the interesting things dealt with in the exhibition. ‘In mining’ as Theme suggests even more strongly a restricted starting point, from which it would be a little more awkward to shift to the general topic of the exhibition. The fi nal two Themes (‘To “test” the air in mining’ and ‘The air’) are both very restricted as starting points in this context, and would be more likely to occur later in the article rather than at the beginning. The comparison of the diff erent versions underlines the fact that, although each refers to the same state of aff airs in the world, they are by no means interchangeable. That is, the diff erent choice of Theme (amongst other changes) has contributed to making a diff erent meaning.

You may feel, in reading this analysis, that it is tempting to say that the Theme is

‘what the clause is about’ – and indeed Halliday (1985a: 39) originally suggested that this was the meaning of Theme. However, this can lead into problems. It certainly seems a good way of capturing the diff erence between the second and third versions above to say that one is ‘about’ yellow canaries, while the other is ‘about’ miners; but the original version also seems intuitively to be ‘about’ yellow canaries, since that is the Subject of the clause. In other words, this way of expressing the meaning of Theme makes it hard to distinguish it from Subject. That is why it is better to keep to the idea of Theme as the ‘point of departure of the message’ or ‘that which locates

and orients the clause within its context’ (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014: 89). These two ways of describing Theme will probably still seem rather vague, but the analyses later in this chapter of Theme in whole texts should help to make them clearer.