Identifying unmarked topical thematic patterns: Evidence from spoken and written isiXhosa texts

Abstract

The author adopts Halliday's (1985, 1994) textual meta-function framework, which deals with the division of the messages into Theme (TH) and Rheme (RM) in Systemic Functional Linguistics. Halliday and Matthiessen (2004:64) define the TH as ‘the starting point’ and the RH as ‘the remainder’ of any message. This article strictly investigates the elements that function as the unmarked topical themes (UTTHs) in Halliday's terminology. To identify the concept(s) under investigation, two authentic isiXhosa texts are analysed. The findings demonstrate that the dominant and compulsory unmarked topical themes are represented by a nominal group functioning as the subject constituents, namely the bound and dependent morphemes known as the subject markers (SMs), and the different mobile subject class nouns (S CLNs), which are occasionally substituted or represented by the different types of pronouns or even descriptives such as ‘adjectives’, ‘relatives’ and the ‘possessives’. The former elements, SMs, are restricted to a pre-verbal position at the beginning of the clause in the TH part, while the latter, S CLNs, co-occur freely, pre-verbally in the TH section or post-verbally in the RM section. The article concludes that the UTTH patterns and cohesion in isiXhosa are dominated by the parts of the words which are inflectional, dependent and position bound prefixes.