Marked and Unmarked Thematization Patterns: A Contrastive Study of Persuasive Texts Written by Native and Non-Native English Columnists

Thematization is considered the mental act or process of selecting particular topics as themes in discourse or words as themes in sentences. This paper examines thematization strategies in English opinion articles written by American and Iranian journalists. To this end, two of the leading newspapers in the United States and Iran, The New York Times and Tehran Times, have been chosen. Based on the qualitative and quantitative analysis of textual features and marked and unmarked themes of 12 opinion articles (6 from each newspaper), this study aims to find out how these two groups of professional writers organize their themes, into marked and unmarked ones and what effects these organizations have on the audiences. The findings revealed that textual features were present in both sets of data. The occurrences of marked and unmarked themes were not significantly different. The findings revealed that thematization patterns can help the understanding of the texts. The results also showed that marked themes have an impact on the audiences. The results were relatively the same in the original texts and their translations.

Keywords:

Thematization Patterns , Marked Theme , Unmarked Theme , Theme and Rheme , Systemic Functional Grammar