A contrastive look at Theme as point of departure in English and Spanish academic writing

Abstract

This paper offers a detailed study of Theme as point of departure in English and Spanish academic texts. A corpus of around 45,000 words is examined from different perspectives to compare the realizations, functions and interplays of the point of departure in these two languages. Examples reveal crosslinguistic contrasts in terms of (a) the preferred realizations of thematic elements, (b) the strategies to maintain participant identity and present new participants and (c) the resources used to construe texture. We will see that whereas English favours thematic non-pronominal noun groups, Spanish combines these with other realizations. Additionally, the different syntactic characteristics of each language have a reflection on different ways of signalling semantic continuity and on textual development in general. The findings presented in this paper should make a significant contribution to the existing literature on Theme, as well as on academic writing and contrastive typological research.