The analysis of the organization of literary discourse in Spanish.

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Ann Montemayor Borsinger

Keywords

Literary discourse, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Theme, Method of development.

Abstract

This work illustrates the heuristic potential of Systemic Functional Linguistics for analyzing the organization of literary discourse in Spanish. It is based on a systemic-functional and discursive view of Theme considered as the succession of points of departure chosen to construe text, which represent its ‘Method of Development’. The analysis is based on a corpus taken from Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges to examine the concepts of marked Theme and unmarked Theme for Spanish. It also illustrates the notions of hyperTheme, the first clause of a paragraph, and macroTheme, the point of departure of a whole text. These insights on the concept of Theme allow for a deeper understanding of the organization of discourse.

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Corpus

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