A discourse analysis of six stories based on the thematic progression factor: Halliday and Matthiessen's functional grammar approach (2014)

Document Type : Research

Authors

1 Department of Linguistics, Islamic South Tehran branch, Valiasr, Azad University, Tehran, Iran

2 professor, Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities, Tarbiat Modarres University, Tehran, Iran

3 Associate professor, Department of foreign languages,, Faculty of Literature and foreign languages, South Tehran branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran,Iran

Abstract

Achieving a successful communication in language involves the writer's organization of the meanings in clauses and texts and reader's identification of it. However, the Absence of identification of such organization has caused the analyst reader not to have a perfect interpretation of the messages of the texts. Since in functional grammar it is supposed that the organization of the message is represented in the framework of thematic system in textual metafunction, to analyze six short Persian stories including 3736 clauses of this research, first a data analysis sheet was designed based on Shieh and Lin thematic patterns (2011) in the framework of Halliday and Matthiessen's functional grammar (2014). Next, to answer the research question which was how the thematic systems helped the coherence and conveyance of the messages of texts and to verify the research hypothesis which was the thematic system by using thematic patterns in the short stories achieved coherence and conveyance of the messages which represented the textual meanings, the frequency and the percentage of identified patterns were calculated. The results showed that predominantly the constant pattern was used as a major strategy and common writing style to organize meanings, continue and preserve the topic to convey the messages. Nevertheless, when there were good discoursal reasons such as directing, extending or limiting a topic, mostly the linear pattern and sometimes derived hyper and juxtaposition patterns and rarely multiple pattern were used as other strategies and uncommon writing styles in texts to achieve coherence and to convey the messages

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