Stylistic Study of Thematic Structure and Thematic Features in Ama A. Aidoo’s “Comparisons or Who Said a Bird Cannot Father a Crab?”

Abstract

This paper seeks to examine the Thematic structure and Thematic features in Ama Ata Aidoo’s short story entitled “Comparison or Who Said a Bird Cannot Father a Crab?” in order to take stockof how they realize the writer’s literary style. It draws its theoretical construct- THEME - from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL henceforth) (Halliday and Hasan, 1976, Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004, Eggins 1994/2004, Bloor and Bloor, 2004, etc.). The study begins with a lexicogrammatical clause-by-clause description of the story with a view to pinpointing the salient linguistic properties the writer employs to encode Textual meaning therein. The findings reveal the use of so many clause simplexes packaged into clause-complexes but predominantly rife with Topical Themes in a usual/normal/expected position/slot. They also exude the deployment of a considerable rate of marked Themes and marked dependent Themes. All these, de facto, denote a combination of the features of both spoken and written language in the story.