A Thematic Approach To Textual Coherence

In recent years, the Systemic Functional Grammar has increasingly been viewed as providing a powerful framework for discourse or text analysis. As far as text is concerned, textual cohesion and coherence are two unavoidable aspects. Text coherence can be approached from different perspectives and till the 1990s many theoretical systems concerning this subject have been established.The author of this thesis intends to approach textual coherence from the perspective of theme - theme theory, for the purpose of clarifying whether this theory is a useful tool in text analysis and whether English folk stories display a preferred sequence of choice in thematic progression patterns, to confirm Danes' assertion that text connexity will be represented, among other things, by thematic progression and that thematic progression serves as the skeleton of the plot.The thesis is composed of six chapters. The first chapter is the introduction. In the second chapter some important concepts are made clear. For example, what is text? Text refers to any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole. It is not a grammatical unit, but a semantic unit. Then the conditions of textual coherence are discussed and the role of topic relevance, the most important factor in textual coherence, is emphasized. At the end of this part, some distinctive elements of folk stories are elucidated and the author clarifies why English folk stories are chosen as the investigation object.The third chapter is the theoretical foundation of the thesis, so theme - rheme theory is expounded in detail, including the birth of the notion, the division between theme and rheme, classification of theme, the thematic progression patterns. Based on the previous study and inspired by some tentative experiments, the author of this paper suggests two amendments to the functional division of theme and rheme. The first concerns what kind of elements in a clause can be the topical theme; the second is about how many elements can be included in the ideational theme.The next two chapters are the empirical study and the findings. With the help of the detailed analysis of topic relevance and thematic progression in 10 texts adopted from The Traditional Beliefs, Legends and Customs of the British and Americans, the author confirms that theme-rheme theory is instrumental to the internal continuity or coherence of text. Thematic progression propels the development of the text to some extent and makes text coherence semantically and logically possible. Textual theme, functioning as explicit cohesive ties and presupposition, is of great importance in text coherence. Topical theme, through topical relevance, is, of course, the backbone. As far as interpersonal theme is concerned, it seldom makes appearance in folk stories, so it is not an indispensable part. At the same time we see that folk stories demonstrate their preferred thematic progression models. The correlation between thematic progression and a certain text type enriches our understanding about thematic progression in text analysis, and the indispensable significance of thematic progression in the construction and the development of text and its contribution to TEFL reading and writing are self-evident.To illustrate how theme - rheme theory is practically applied, in the last part of the paper one folk story Robin Hood is exemplified, in which a diagram and a table are given to show respectively how the theme is progressed, how many theme progression patterns are used and how many topical themes and rhemes are relevant to the topic of the story.