The theme of a clause has been defined as the point of departure of the clause as message’ (Halliday 1967:212) and ‘the peg on which the message is hung’ (Halliday 1970:161). Fries (1981) has shown that the information placed in the themes of the independent conjoinable clause complexes of a passage relates to the perceived method of development of that passage. However, the metaphors used to describe the meaning of theme (such as ‘point of departure’ and ‘peg on which to hang the message’) need to be developed.

A preliminary examination of English texts representing a variety of registers shows that almost all themes provide a context in terms of which to interpret the remainder of the message. More specifically, it was found that themes are used at least for the following four discourse purposes: 1) to provide information which is required to interpret the main message; 2) to cancel an assumption which has been established in the previous context; 3) to prevent temporal or locational misinterpretation; and 4) to highlight the point of an elaboration.

Fries, Peter H. 1981. On the status of theme in English: Arguments from discourse. Forum Linguisticum 6(1):1-38.

Halliday, M. A. K. 1967. Notes on transitivity and theme in English. Part 2. Journal of Linguistics 3:177-274.

Halliday, M. A. K. 1970. Language structure and language function. New Horizons in Linguistics, John Lyons (ed.), 140-164. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin.

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