Thematizer

Both the graph and the highlighted text in this tab visualize the various themes present in your text. The graph shows the five core marked theme types and their frequency from the text(s) you uploaded. Beneath the graph, your text is presented with the various theme types and can generally be understood as follows:

  1. Modal Themes: These add subjectivity or psychological and emotional meaning to your sentence, e.g., surprisingly, obviously
  2. Structural Themes: Connectors that create logical bridges between sentences, e.g., therefore, in addition.
  3. Hypotactic Themes: These introduce dependent clauses to add a condition, causality, temporality or concessions, e.g., if, when, because.
  4. Circumstantial Themes: Mainly prepositional phrases for showing place, time or means, e.g., in the following, yesterday, despite progress.
  5. Projecting Themes: These "project" the topic at hand to a *that*-clause to establish objectivity or for emphasis, e.g., it is clear that…, the main argument was that…
  6. Grammatical Themes: The grammatical subject of independent or projected clauses.
  7. Rheme: Everything after the grammatical theme.

Note that you can select multiple documents to compare their thematic progression frequencies in the graph. Only the first text from the documents you choose will appear with highlights below, however.

Finally, it should be noted that Thematizer's current accuracy rate for parsing thematic progression is approximately 85.0%; therefore, please be aware that parsing errors will likely be present, particularly where paraphrase (lexical entailment) and coreference resolution are concerned.

*Note that grammatical themes are not included since they appear in nearly every sentence
Text Analysis Output with Your Text
Hover over the highlight to show the kind of theme. Note that unhiglighted text corresponds to the rheme of the sentence.

This program, Thematizer, takes in a text and outputs the theme, rheme and thematic progression patterns of each sentence through thematic constituent analysis. A theme is all the words before the main verb of the sentence whereas a rheme is everyting including and after the main verb. A theme can also be subcategorized into a so-called marked theme, which is commonly realized as an adverb or prepositional phrase at the beginning of a sentence. For example, a marked theme could be "in the past", "however" or "after that." The output of every marked theme, theme, and rheme from the text is presented in the first results tab. In the second tab, the marked theme distribution and semantic classification are summarized. Examples of such semantic classes are "temporal" for "when" or "afterwards", "causative" for "because" or "therefore", and many more. In the third tab, the development of each theme and rheme is presented through thematic progression. There might not be a theme in every sentence. But, each sentence must have a rheme. Depending on how the theme or rheme is developed from one clause to the next, different thematic progression patterns emerge. One progression pattern is called 'continuous', where the same theme appears in two consecutive sentences. While not too common, the rheme can also be developed and is called rhematic progression. In this case, the same rheme is developed across consecutive sentences. After Thematizer analyzes the entire text, each of progression pattern, including overall frequency and means of progression , are shown. The exact progression pattern from sentence to sentence can be seen by hovering your mouse over the highlighted portion of the text within the third tab. The final tab of results shows how the frequency distribution of your text's progression patterns compare to other text types. Thematizer considers Wikipedia articles, university-level texts from native and non-native English writers, lyrics and blog articles. It should be noted that the thematic frequencies in your text will not likely correspond to the frequency of other text types exactly. However, they should give you a general idea of which text type your text falls into based on the various patterns that were identified. Hopefully, your understanding of theme, rheme and thematic progression as realized in writing has deepened.