A discourse analysis of contemporary Persian text stories based on the theme factor in textual metafunction from linguistic perspective: Halliday and Matthiesen's functional grammar approach

Articles in Press

Document Type : مقالات علمی پژوهشی

Authors
S. A. navabi sohi 1
F. Aghgolzadeh 2
A. Mohseni 3
1 PHD STUDENT
2 full professor tarbiat modares
3 associate professor islamic azad university south tehran
10.48311/LRR.61676
Abstract
The present article aims to analyze six contemporary short stories based on Halliday and Matthiesen's systemic functional grammar framework (2014). In functional grammar, the message and textual meaning of clauses will not be revealed to the reader without identifying the topical themes and the discourse factors influencing to highlight them. Thus a perfect interpretation of the message will not be obtained. The study answers the question how the thematic structure in clauses helps highlight and convey the author's messages. The study hypothesis is: the thematic structure conveys the author's message by highlighting the topical themes by means of syntactic tools. the study corpus contains six contemporary short stories, comprising 3736 clauses. The descriptive- analytic method were used to analyze all the 3736 clauses based on thematic structure in textual metafunction. The data analysis showed that in unmarked clauses the topical themes were used in their natural place as subjects, mostly being participants to preserve and maintain the topic. However, when there were good discourse reasons such as new events, topic change and certain meaning, mostly preposed adjuncts were used as topical themes in marked declarative clauses. while the process was used as topical theme in imperatives to show the participants social status. Therefore, the readers by using the thematic structure and identifying the topical themes can understand the author's intended textual meaning and his message in unmarked and marked clauses.

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Language Related Research

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 13 July 2025