Predicated themes as textual resource: an analysis of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country

Maria Martinez LIROLA
(University of Alicante, Spain)
Bradley SMITH
(Macquarie University)

ABSTRACT: In this presentation we will pay attention to the dialogue between text and context during the apartheid period in South Africa,. Our text is the novel Cry, the Beloved Country, written by the South African writer Alan Paton; the context is a society where certain meanings were not ‘available’ for negotiation in the spoken, face-to-face context mode. Our contention is it was only in a novel that one could offer the sort of meanings that Paton was offering in that particular historical period, that context of culture. In particular we wish to explore a non-canonical construction, the predicated theme, and its function in creating textual cohesion, contrastiveness, and to build the context of the novel. The analysis of the structural component of predicated themes (theme and rheme and known and new information) will be essential to understand the use of the structure. Special attention will be paid to the discourse functions and stylistic distribution of the examples. The use of Predicated Themes, in this and in other novels, allows Paton to not only make the text a more coherent unit – a text – but also allows him to draw the text ‘closer’ to the contexts of situation and culture of the reader, drawing the reader into a ‘dialogue’ with the issues of the culture of the time, into the ‘cultural dialogue’ of black and white South Africans. Understanding the role this grammatical resource plays in the novel will help us to better understand the context Paton is trying to create, and the relations between the contexts of culture and situation, and language.

KEY-WORDS: Predicated theme, Alan Paton, Systemic Functional Linguistics, context of culture.