The Absence Of Textual Structure In The Cardiff Grammar

Fawcett (2010: 250):

One difference between the Cardiff and the Sydney Grammars is that the former does not mark the 'Theme' function of a Subject explicitly in the structure, while the Sydney Grammar does. It is in fact redundant to show this, in that the Subject's status is as a type of Theme is directly inferable from the fact that it is the Subject — i.e., the grammar specifies that any PR that is conflated with the Subject is thereby automatically also a "Subject Theme'. The fact that it must be a PR excludes "empty Subjects" (as in the underlined parts of 

It was Ivy that did it, 

It's likely that she did and 

There's a fly in my soup), 

which are not 'Themes'. (See Fawcett in press for such 'enhanced theme' constructions.)

 

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this is a serious (and widespread) misunderstanding of Theme in SFL Theory. Importantly, Theme is defined textually, not interpersonally (Subject) or experientially (Participant Role). Theme and Subject are independent choices, and Fawcett's model fails to account for all the instances where Theme is not conflated with Subject — e.g. Theme/Adjunct, Theme/Complement, Theme/Predicator — and fails to account for both textual and interpersonal Themes.

Moreover, the absence of a Rheme element in Fawcett's model means that it does not provide a textual structure of the clause, since a structure is the relationship between elements.

[2] To be clear, in SFL Theory, because Theme is defined textually, the underlined parts of these three instances are indeed examples of Theme (and only in the final instance does the Theme not conflate with a participant).

See, for example, Halliday (1994: 60, 98).

[3] As previously noted, Fawcett (in press) is still unpublished, 21 years after the first edition of this work.