Themes and Generic Purposes in English Written Arguments : A Systemic Reinterpretation of Theme-Genre Relationship
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This paper explores the relation between Theme and the generic structure recognised in an English written argumentative activity ('letters to the editor') of two different disciplines or fields (socio-politics and natural science) from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics (hereafter SFL). Written argument can be generalised as belonging to a tenor-oriented genre type, where the writer needs to justify his/her claim or thesis made on a particular issue and to persuade the reader that he/she is right in his/her discussion. Many systemicists have revealed that the experiential content of Themes within a generic stage of a text correlates with the purpose of that generic stage of that text. They, however, have investigated only field-oriented genres, but not tenororiented ones. The aim of this study is to examine the validity of the correlation of the experiential content of Themes of a text with the different generic stages of structure of a written argumentative text. The paper finds that it is hard to specify a particular experiential content in Themes which should realise the purpose of each stage of a text, and that the spreading of experiential Theme contents in the sample texts depends upon the contextual nature of the generic stage and the writer of the letter, the interpersonal factor which is usually suppressed in texts of field-oriented genres. The paper also discovers that the interpersonal quantum of metafunction involved in some particular sorts of textual and marked Themes plays a vital role in the tenor of justification and persuasion.
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- Themes and Generic Purposes in English Written Arguments : A Systemic Reinterpretation of Theme-Genre Relationship