ABSTRACT
This chapter foregrounds the role of text behavior (instantiation), agnation (axis) and a trinocular perspective (stratification) in the description of theme in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). It aims at showing how valuable stratification, instantiation and axis are as descriptive standards because they reveal how ideational and interpersonal components of the grammar are acting as entry conditions for subsystems of THEME. Accordingly, the chapter’s main contribution will be to show how theme organizes ideational and interpersonal meanings by contextualizing the clause as a message. The description identifies theme trinocularly with respect to stratification: from above, as the realization of message functions in the discourse flow; from below, taking group rank as the unit preselected by Theme; from roundabout, as an enabling function of ideational and interpersonal meanings (see Wang’s chapter and Quiroz’s chapter in this volume). Second, the description draws on corpus evidence, examining how instances determine relative frequencies of occurrences for the language—which reveal cryptotypical Theme patterns. Corpus evidence is instrumental, since for this study it is the sole source of data. The corpus CALIBRA was used. CALIBRA is a 1 million-token corpus with 803 texts of spontaneous BP, distributed across registers of spoken and written modes (8,394 major clauses on 120 texts were analyzed) (Figueredo, 2014). Results indicate that theme organizes a quantum of change (experiential meaning) and a quantum of interaction (interpersonal meaning), when viewed from above, by arranging both quanta in the flow of information. theme features are preselected by the textual discourse semantic functions of messages, which allows each clause individually to contribute to the overall meaning of the text. Moreover, theme predicts waves of discourse that are yet to follow, allowing each clause to be interpreted according to the speaker’s argument (Halliday and Matthiessen, 1999, p. 12)—i.e., register expectancy.
