Thematization: Point-of-view Analysis

The writer’s voice or point of view is the perspective from which he or she views a discourse topic. For example, unlike spoken discourse, the writer’s stance or attitude towards any topic argued is not discernible through the tone and diction of written communication. Academic writing that displays ‘wider’ knowledge must foreground the essay writer’s viewpoint concerning the topic under debate in the essay. Nominalization as a grammatical feature is critiqued as structurally eroding the quality of writing; however, nominalization of an abstract concept subordinated in the clause-initial position carries the highest degree of communicative competence like the context-independent New information in the Rheme of an information unit. In the metafunction of clause-initial backgrounded New information, the relationships of cause, distinguished as logical, textual, or experiential, direct the reader towards a type of viewpoint, otherwise seen as an abstraction in nominalization that makes sentences long and clunky and removes the Agent, unlike in active sentences. The point of view analysis is thus taken up in this chapter through an analysis of the nominalizing grammar (NPs and VPs) to reveal the significance of the ‘perspectivization’ in discourse that is reasoned and developed from a clause to a paragraph.