TOPIC AND SUBJECT AS THEME
Themes which conflate with Subject are participants in the transitivity structures and typically refer to persons, creatures and things. As such, they are the most likely candidates to fulfil the discourse role of Topic or ‘topical Theme’ at clause level. They are typically presented by the speaker as identifiable or at least accessible to the hearer and are usually encoded by full nominal groups or proper names when introduced for the first time. Important Theme-Topic-Subject referents set up referent chains which can transcend clausal boundaries, maintaining topic continuity as long as the speaker or writer wishes. This is an important test for ‘aboutness’. Many referents enter the discourse, but only a few are selected to be major topics.
We can track the referent chain, which can also be seen as an identity chain, of a major referent as it is repeated across several clauses by an anaphoric pronoun, by an alternative NG or by repetition of the name or proper noun. Such is the case in the extract adapted from the obituary by Clancy Sigal in The Guardian of the American actress Bette Davis:
Bette Davis was the most formidable screen actress of her time. She imposed her will on audiences, and on often inferior material, with determination and galvanic force . . . For better, and sometimes worse, she personified the ‘new woman’ with all her contradictions and hysterias . . .
Davis was building a certain kind of woman on the screen, the like of which had often been hinted at but never fully revealed. Tortured and self-torturing, she won her fans often by playing against their sympathies . . .
Unlike many actresses of her generation who retired rather than let audiences feast voyeuristically on the fading remnants of their beauty, Davis – the ugly duckling – positively gloried in exposing her wrinkles and bloodshot, staring eyes. In the 1960s she played a succession of grotesque old dears, in pictures like Whatever Happened To Baby Jane (opposite her one-time rival, Joan Crawford).
The ‘referent chain’ of this paragraph can be shown graphically as follows: Bette Davis (Subject, proper name) – she (Subject pron., three times) –(Subject, surname) – Davis (+alternative NG the ugly duckling).
Indefinite, and therefore unidentified, but specific referents as Subject Themes are also found in English, however. We might start up a conversation by saying A man I met in Beirut once told me a good story. At this point in the discourse we haven’t established contact with either the man or the story, and for this reason both are presented as indefinite. Similarly, news items often present an indefinite, Subject Theme such as the following adapted item in which both the commission and the man are indefinite but specific:
A special commission set up by the Kremlin in an attempt to improve the status of Russian women is to be presided over by a man.
