Theme as point of departure in English and Spanish academic writing and casual conversation

Abstract This paper describes and compares the realisations, functions and interrelations of Theme as point of departure (POD), i.e. Theme stripped of any reference to “what the clause is about”, in two languages — English and Spanish — and two genres — academic writing and casual conversation. The ultimate goal is to find out which POD characteristics are (a) generalisable across both genres and both languages; (b) generalisable across both genres (but language-dependent); (c) generalisable across both languages (but genre-specific); and (d) genre-specific and language-specific. Among other things, the contrastive analysis reveals that POD is highly determined by metafunctional interplay, PODs in casual conversation reflecting the interpersonally-driven nature of this genre and cross-linguistic contrasts reflecting different pressures of interpersonal meaning on textual organisation.