This article investigates one of the discourse functions that has been proposed for the variation in English of the position of adverbials within the clause. The view that initial positioning, or 'thematisation', of adverbials establishes scope over larger discourse spans (Lowe 1987; Downing 1991) is tested by examining three kinds of adverbial in a corpus of short written expository texts in English: adverbials of location (prepositional phrases and when-clauses), nonfinite purpose clauses, and finite if-clauses. Objective methods are used to measure persistence of adverbial scope and how scope is cancelled. Data on length of scope and position of adverbial are compared to see whether there is evidence of a dependent relation. In most cases, initial adverbials do not appear to establish discourse scope and in some cases noninitial adverbials do appear to establish discourse scope: It is concluded that to establish scope cannot be the function of initial position. Because cancellation only occurs initially half the time, it is also concluded that there is no special relation between initial position and cancellation.
This paper analyses the use of the word where in texts written by Malay-speaking learners of English. Data from a learner corpus is compared with data from two corpora of academic writing by native English-speaker writers. Considerable over-use of where is found: this is explained as a consequence of various patterns of misuse of where and non-use of standard forms of relativization common in written academic English. Suggestions are offered as to (a) the causes of misuse and (b) teaching strategies for helping students avoid misuse.
Fries (1981) hypothesises that the textual phenomena of 'thematic pro- gression' (TP) (Danesˇ1974) and 'method of development' (MOD) provide discourse evidence for the function proposed by Halliday (1967) for Theme, in particular that 'initial position in the sentence, or sentence-level Theme, means "point of departure of the sentence as message"'. This paper discusses the theoretical basis for this hypothesis, in particular the relation between TP and MOD, and reviews previous empirical research. Further research conducted by the author is described, into global proportions of TP, TP patterning, and the relation between TP and rhematic progression (RP) in a small corpus of 80 short argumentative texts. It was found that only small proportions of either argumentative text, or high-quality argumentative text could be considered as having a MOD. It was also found that texts had comparable levels of TP and RP. It is concluded that MOD is not a universal feature of discourse organisation, and therefore not conclusive evidence for Fries's original hypothesis.
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