Discourse organisation through Theme position

Abstract

This paper focuses on the role of elements placed in the initial position i.e. elements fulfilling the role of Theme in discourse organisation. The large-scale corpus study proposes a new methodology based on quantitative analysis of the discourse roles of sentence-initial elements. The theoretically-based hypothesis is that Theme position has an important function in discourse organisation. Theme, defined as the starting point of the message, is composed of the first elements that the reader perceives. The analysis of the distribution and the use in discourse of these elements gives us a great overview on the textual organisation of different types of text.