Theme Analysis in two Excerpts from Amma Darko’s Faceless: a Hallidayan Systemic Approach

Abstract

Abstract This article has explored, from a Hallidayan systemic perspective, the grammar of textual meaning in two excerpts culled from Amma Darko’s Faceless. The aim of this scholarly research is to dig out, through thematic analysis, the hidden messages of the author in the studied excerpts on the one hand, and help lay bare her ideology to make explicit what positions, biases and interpretations are encoded therein on the other. To be able to attain that goal, both the quantitative and qualitative research methods have been appealed to. The quantitative research method employed by the study has helped to recap the linguistic features of the analyzed excerpts in a statistical table while paving the way to their interpretation via the qualitative method. Indeed, the research has arrived at interesting results. Among several others to be discovered while reading this article, the predominance of the topical Themes suggests that both studied texts have remarkable thematic potentials. Moreover, the use of the predicated Theme in the first of the studied texts, is not only illustrative of the foolishness, irresponsibility and cowardice poverty can lead people into but also revelatory of the tortuosity of human beings’ minds. Some of the atypical meanings disclosed by the marked Themes are that political leaders all around the world especially those African should fulfill their leadership role of creating jobs for their citizens and that governments should try to rehabilitate street children in order to save their lives from jeopardy. Furthermore, people, whatever their social class, should give one another a helping hand for better living conditions and sustainable development. The research has interestingly opened up to such further investigation areas of the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as the experiential meaning, the interpersonal meaning and discourse semantics.