Thematic and Topical Structuring in Three Subgenres: A Contrastive Study
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.200310403Keywords:
theme, thematic progression, discourse topic, sentence topic, genreAbstract
The main goal of this article is to analyse the thematic and topical structure of three subgenres: narratives for young children, news items and tourist brochures. The 60 texts under analysis (twenty of each type) were written specifically for publication, and consequently do not provide the possibility of direct feedback between the writer and reader. However, their main rhetorical purpose and their register (Propp 1972, van Dijk 1988a, b, Cook 1992, Luch 2003) are clearly different and it is hypothesized that this plays a key role in their thematic and topical organization. In children’s stories theme tends to be closely associated with topic and in news items the correlation between theme and topic is even higher, whereas in tourist brochures theme seems to precede topic. This positioning is attributed to the communicative intentions of the journalist, travel writer and storywriter, respectively.
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