ABSTRACT

This chapter shows how the clause is structured, first in terms of what the speaker takes as his starting point for the message and in terms of what author chooses as his focal point. It presents how the items that are chosen as starting points throughout a text contribute to the way the text is built up, and thus give it a unified structure. The chapter explores how these items link together throughout the text, again contributing to its unified structure. The textual metafunction deals with those aspects of meaning that structure the clause into a meaningful segment of text. The theme is defined as the speaker's starting point, and it is realized in French by being placed in initial position in the clause. Cohesion is the linguistic phenomenon that links different items in the text together, so that the clauses are not simply a sequence of clauses, but are knit into a unit that we call a text.