An Analysis Of Thematic Structures And Thematic Progression Patterns In English Rap Song Lyrics

The theme theory is one of the fundamental theories in Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL), concerning the textual meta-function. Halliday states that every sentence can be divided into the theme and the rheme. The theme is in the initial position as the departure of information, while the remaining part as the rheme. Themes can be classified into three types: simple themes, multiple themes and clausal themes. In a coherent text, the theme and the rheme in one sentence are closely related to the theme and the rheme preceding or following the sentence, to make the information in each sentence progress. Such theme-rheme relations in a text are called thematic progression patterns. Danes first proposes three patterns: the linear pattern, the constant pattern and the derived pattern. Huang Guowen puts forward six thematic progression patterns on the basis of Danes’, namely, the parallel pattern, the continuous pattern, the concentrated pattern, the crossing pattern, the alternative pattern and the derived pattern. Under the theme theory and thematic progression patterns, lots of studies have been done on a variety of discourses, mainly including medical texts, advertisements, academic abstracts, politic speeches, and so on. But fewer studies have been done on song lyrics, not to speak of rap song lyrics.This thesis investigates the features of thematic structures and thematic progression patterns in English rap song lyrics at the clausal and textural levels, from the perspective of SFL.Under the theoretical framework of the theme theory, Huang Guowen’s six thematic progression patterns and Xu Shenghuan’s seven semantic logical relations, this thesis analyzes the lyrics of the 30 English rap songs, the top three songs from the Billboard Year-end Chart: “Hot Rap Songs” from the year 2006 to the year 2015. The following are features in thematic structures:(1) Minor and elliptical clauses do not have themes, but there are very few of them in English rap song lyrics mainly for the purpose of saving space. For those clauses that do have themes, the themes are mainly simple themes and multiple themes, but there are few clausal themes. Because of the length and complexity, rappers are inclined to choose simple and multiple themes to make the messages and emotions more easily understood by the audience;(2) Marked themes account for only a small portion of themes compared with the dominant percentage of unmarked ones. Through employing marked themes, rappers could lay an emphasis on a prominent part, so as to attract the audience’s attention. The higher frequency of unmarked theme is the result of overwhelming employment of declarative clauses;(3) The most preferred constituents serving as topical themes are pronouns, followed by nouns and verbs. The reason for the higher frequency of pronouns may be that the distance between rappers and the audience can be shortened through the frequent employment of pronouns. Due to the employment of numerous imperative clauses, verbs also occur frequently as topical themes. Modal adjuncts and vocatives are used to serve as interpersonal themes to easily express rappers subjective opinions, and structurals and conjunctive adjuncts are employed to serve as textual themes because of their function of connecting or linking one clause to another one or to the whole text, so as to make all the lyrics become more coherent and systematic. In terms of thematic progression patterns, the parallel pattern, the continuous pattern and the concentrated pattern frequently occur in English rap song lyrics, because these three patterns have simple and direct logical thinking, which could help rappers better organize messages through lyrics and help the audience better understand lyrics, while the alternative pattern and the derived pattern have much lower percentage because these two types require the audience to do a lot of information process so as to figure out the complex logical relations involved in such patterns.Hopefully, this study will help the audience, especially English learners, to discover how rappers efficiently communicate with their audience and to have a better understanding of the messages conveyed by the lyrics. It is also hoped that this study could extend the applicable areas of the theme theory and thematic progression patterns and enrich first-hand linguistic materials for researches of SFL.