Phrasal Verb Indeterminacy

Halliday (1994: 210): 

Thematicity And Newsworthiness In Verbal And Nominal Groups

Halliday (1994: 197):

… And A Compensatory Principle

Halliday (1994: 61):

A Scale Of Thematic Freedom …

Halliday (1994: 61):

The Principle Of Ordering In The English Clause

Halliday (1994: 51-2):

The Thematic Principle In Interrogative Clauses

 Halliday (1994: 46):

Glossing Thematic Difference

  Halliday (1994: 38):

Textual Semantics

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 378):

The text base is oriented towards the ideation base and the interaction base. It provides the resources for constructing meanings from these two bases as information of a kind that can be shared as text. An ideational figure and an interpersonal move are constructed as information in the form of a message. Such a message is related to the preceding discourse and differentiates informational statuses in terms of thematicity and newsworthiness. From the speaker's point of view, the text base is a resource for developing a text, message by message, and for guiding the listener in his/her interpretation of the text; and from the listener's point of view, it is a resource for constructing such an interpretation.

Resources For Marking Textual Status: Structural vs Cohesive

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 623):

By textual statuses, we mean values assigned to elements of discourse that guide speakers and listeners in processing these elements. We have, in fact, already met two kinds of textual status – thematicity and newsworthiness. Theme and New are processed quite differently when interactants manage the flow of text; while Theme is the point of departure for integrating the information being presented in the clause, New is the main point to retain from the information presented. But whereas Theme and New are parts of textual structures – Theme ^ Rheme in the clause and Given + New in the information unit, respectively, the textual statuses that come under the heading of cohesion, REFERENCE and ELLIPSIS, are not. That is, while an element is marked cohesively as identifiable by means of a grammatical item such as the personal pronoun they, or as continuous by means of a grammatical item such as the nominal substitute one, the textual statuses of identifiability and continuity are not structural functions of the clause or of any other grammatical unit. They can occur freely within Theme or Rheme, and within Given or New (although there are certain unmarked associations).

The Clause Complex As Textual Domain: Thematicity

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 549-50):

The sequence of clauses within a clause complex is textually significant from a thematic point of view. This sequence is fixed in the case of parataxis (with the exception of parataxis in the environment of projection); here the primary clause is in a sense thematic in relation to the secondary one even though the sequence is fixed: the primary clause may serve as a point of departure or orientation for the secondary clause. However, in the case of hypotaxis, the sequence is not fixed; it can be progressive (α ^ β) or regressive (β ^ α) – or the hypotactically dependent clause may be included within the dominant clause (α << β >>). For example, the hypotactic nexus β as he came to a thicket, α he heard the faint rustling of leaves is regressive, with the dependent clause as he came to a thicket given thematic status within the nexus. In hypotactic nexuses of certain logicosemantic types, the dependent clause may be the focus of theme predication.

Circumstantial Vs Intensive Attributes: Thematicity & Definiteness

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 291):

Unlike the Attribute of an ‘intensive’ clause, the Attribute of a ‘circumstantial’ one is frequently Theme in registers where the thematic status is rhetorically motivated … And unlike intensive Attributes, such circumstantial Attributes frequently have a ‘definite’ nominal group …

Deicticity And Thematicity

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 113-4):

The WH- element in turn is part of a wider set embracing both WH- and TH- forms, which taken together fulfil a deictic or ‘pointing out’ function …

The generalisation we can make here is that all deictic elements are characteristically thematic …

How Information In The Text Base Can Be Modelled

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 406-7):

(i) The second-order character of textual information is captured by defining it in terms of the already existing semantic network in the ideation base (the first-order representation…). This is clearly only a first approximation… the textual metafunction may in fact motivate ideational metaphor as a means of ‘carrying’ textual organisation. 

(ii) Textual prominences constituting textual statuses can then be modelled as partitioned textual spaces of the semantic network. … This is also only a first approximation: textual prominence is a matter of degree and we need to think of a textual space not as a clearly bounded region but rather as a central region, the peak of prominence, from which one can move to more peripheral regions, the troughs of non-prominence. Such gradience is necessary not only to deal with degrees of thematicity and newsworthiness but also to handle identifiability by ‘bridging’…

The Text Base: Messages

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 378): 

The text base is oriented towards the ideation base and the interaction base. It provides the resources for constructing meanings from these two bases as information of a kind that can be shared as text. An ideational figure and an interpersonal move are constructed as information in the form of a message. Such a message is related to the preceding discourse and differentiates informational statuses in terms of thematicity and newsworthiness.

Marking Textual Status

Halliday & Matthiessen (2004: 549-50):

By textual statuses, we mean values assigned to elements of discourse that guide speakers and listeners in processing these elements. We have in fact already met two kinds of textual status — thematicity and newsworthiness. … while Theme is the point of departure for integrating the information being presented in the clause, New is the main point to retain from the information presented.

Circumstance Vs Qualifier [Diagnostic: Thematicity]

Halliday & Matthiessen (2004: 221):

To differentiate them in analysis, we can apply textual probes: in principle, being an element of the clause, a circumstance is subject to all the different textual statuses brought about by theme, theme predication and theme identification. … In contrast, a Qualifier cannot on its own be given textual status in the clause since it is a constituent of a nominal group, not of the clause; so it can only be thematic together with the rest of the nominal group it is part of.