A Thematic Study On The Birthday Of The Infanta

According to Halliday, the Theme is the element which serves as the point of departure of message; it is that with which the clause is concerned. This thesis uses Halliday's thematic theory to study the theme in Wilde's fairy tale- The Birthday of the Infanta.The research questions in this thesis include: 1) the proportion and characteristics of the simple theme and multiple theme in The Birthday of the Infanta; 2) the proportion and characteristics of the experiential, textual and interpersonal theme in the simple and multiple theme; 3) the proportion and characteristics of subject, process and circumstance as theme in the experiential theme; 4) the percentage and characteristics of marked theme and unmarked theme in the experiential theme; 5) the percentage and characteristics of modal adjunct, finite operator and vocative as theme in the interpersonal theme; 6) the percentage and characteristics of conjunction, conjunctive adjunct and continuative as theme in the textual theme..The author marks the different kinds of themes in The Birthday of the Infanta then calculates them with the help of Antconc and at last gets the statistical result to show proportion and characteristics of different themes in The Birthday of the Infanta.The research find: 1) the multiple theme has the largest percentage of the total which shows the complexity of the theme in The Birthday of the Infanta; 2) The experiential theme has the largest percentage and the interpersonal theme has the smallest percentage among the simple theme and multiple theme; 3) the subject as theme has the largest percentage among the experiential theme and the dwarf as theme has the largest percentage among the subject as theme. The six processes as themes all appear in The Birthday of the Infanta. Material process as theme has the largest percentage and mental process as theme has the smallest percentage among the six processes as theme. According to Halliday, there are 9 subcategories of circumstantial theme and 6 subcategories of them appear in The Birthday of the Infanta. Location as theme has the largest percentage of the circumstantial theme; 4) the unmarked theme has the absolute advantage compared with the marked theme in the experiential theme and the marked theme accounts for 14.4% of the experiential theme; 5) the modal adjunct as theme has the largest percentage and vocative as theme has the smallest percentage among the interpersonal theme; 6) The conjunction as theme has the largest percentage among the textual theme. The conjunctive adjunct and continuative as theme have respectively appeared 5 times and account for 13% among the textual theme.