Generating marked Theme through map task: a quantitative motive

In relation to the quantitative aspect, it is believed that natural data might not provide sufficient instances of the phenomena under study. Anderson et al. (1991: 315) show that

“there is no guarantee that the phenomena of theoretical interest will appear with any frequency in naturally occurring speech. Even a huge corpus may fail to provide sufficient instances to support any strong claims about the phenomena under study”. On obtaining marked Theme instances, marked Theme is an unusual and infrequent pattern because of its structure (the occurrence of a Circumstantial Adjunct or a Complement initially) (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014) and function (“signalling either transitions within a narrative or that the Thematic element requires extra prominence in order to show that the perspective being developed within the clause is approached from an unusual angle”) (O’Grady, 2017a: 276) as pointed out in SFL Theme reviewed in 2.3, p. 21. Therefore, drawing on Anderson et al.’s (1991) argument, the possibility of gaining sufficient marked Themes to explore their textual function in the spoken discourse is limited.

Warren and Hay (2012) adopt a similar stance to Anderson et al.’s (1991) on working on natural language. Warren and Hay (2012) state that “Not all questions can be answered using daily- life speech and, some theoretical questions should be addressed using controlled, targeted laboratory speech” (cited in Warner, 2012: 15) and on the advantage of using elicited speech, Jorschick (2009: 8) points out that “Due to the design of the map, specific phrases and utterances can be elicited”. Warren and Hay (2012) do not specify what questions should be addressed using controlled speech nor does Jorschick (2009) specify or give example of the phrases and utterances that could be elicited.

In terms of using the map task dialogue to explore the textual role of the marked Theme, the key thing in the map task interaction is to reach an agreement on how the route is drawn using the landmarks on the map to aid the instruction giver and the instruction receiver in their description. But the discrepancies related to the availability of some landmarks and their location on the map and the fact that the interlocutors are not allowed to share maps as the interaction is only verbal as pointed out above might lead to a communication breakdown. To satisfy the interactive flow, the instruction giver and the instruction receiver might describe these discrepancies in a way that helps them reach an agreement about them and their location on the two versions of the map henceforth reproduce the route on the instruction receiver’s map. Drawing on Warren and Hay’s (2012) and Jorschick’s (2009) arguments on the link between map task design and

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eliciting of specific phrases and utterances and based on marked Theme’s signalling that the clause message is approached from unusual angle, it is likely that the map task interlocutors use marked Theme (make their point of departure a location on the map) due to its importance in easily and effectively directing each other to the landmarks on the map as Example 4.1 below shows. Making landmarks’ location the point of departure of the clause message contributes to resolving the discrepancies on the instruction giver’s and the instruction receiver’s maps henceforth aids the interlocutors in reaching an agreement on the shape of the route and producing it on the instruction receiver’s map as in Example 4.1 below. Example 4.1 is taken from the dialogue of group six in the current study; the full data script of the dialogue of group six is presented in Appendix K. In the example, the whole marked Theme is underlined and the point of departure, the marked topical Theme is emboldened; IG6 and IR6 stand for the instruction giver and the instruction receiver of group six:

Example 4.1

922) IG6…Um do you have a duck pond? 923) IR6: no

924) IG6: do you a farm? 925) IR6: yes

926) IG6: ok so the height of the line on the right hand side of the page is about the middle of the farm

927) IR6: so <unclear words> it dips right down

928) IG6: yeah but not quite at the bottom in the farm but a little higher than that 929) IR6: yeah

930) IG6: but below the mushroom house um and then … so in line with the

yellow house on the bottom [of the page] there is duck pond

931) IR6: [yeah] 932) IR6: yeah

933) IG6: and so the line is sort of like heading in the direction in the farm but it has to go up a little bit around the duck pond

The hypothesis proposed in the current context on the use of the marked Theme in the map task was confirmed and map task did generate rich enough data as the above extract and other illustrative examples on the occurrences of the marked Themes to be examined in the analysis chapter, Chapter Five, show. So the design of the map task satisfies the purpose of the present research that seeks to uncover whether (if so) how marked Theme contributes to achieving coherence interaction about the route.

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In addition, the map task has semi- narrative nature; the instruction giver describes to the instruction receiver how the route is drawn on his/her map and the instruction receiver describes to the instruction giver the landmarks that are found on his/her map. So, map task is also likely to be a good framework to examine how marked Theme functions as a textual device to orient the clause message to the rest of the route description and hence contribute to structuring the map task dialogue. The narrative feature in the map task allows to examine marked Theme’s function of signalling transitions or shift within a narrative (O’Grady, 2016). The intonational realisations of the marked Theme will be examined to reveal how marked Theme is realised prosodically to perform these functions, signalling that the clause is approached from unusual angle and/or signalling a shift in discourse, and whether there is an interplay between marked Theme and the way it is realised prosodically to contribute to its orienting function. It is to be noted that a corpus such as the British National Corpus could be searched for marked Themes but obtaining sound files of the corpus would be difficult. So, map task enables examining the spoken discourse as the map task dialogue is recorded.