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The theme is what is being talked about, the point of departure for the clause as message, and the speaker has within certain limits the option of selecting any element in the clause as thematic.

— Michael Halliday

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More quotes by Michael Halliday

The human sciences have to assume at least an equal responsibility in establishing the foundations of knowledge.

Michael Halliday (1987)

Foregrounding, as I understand it, is prominence that is motivated

p. 112 cited in: Laura Hidalgo-Downing (2000)

The interpersonal function [of language] is the function “to establish, maintain, and specify relations between members of societies”

p. xix cited in: Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen (2010)

The grammatical system has … a functional input and a structural output; it provides the mechanism for different functions to be combined in one utterance

p. 35 cited in: Terence Odlin (1994)

It is part of the task of linguistics to describe texts, and all texts, including those prose or verse, which fall within any definition of literature and are accessible to analysis by the existing methods of linguistics.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Michael Halliday (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.