Metafunctional Analysis of Nominalized Thematic Structures in English and Urdu

Abstract

The current study discusses the metafunctional diversity of nominalized thematic structures in Achebe’s (1958) English novel, Things Fall Apart and in its Urdu translation, Bikharti Duniya (Ullah, 1991). For statistical measurement, O'Donnell’s (2008) scheme of the UAM Corpus tool has been used to annotate the selected corpus. After annotation, some nominalized themes in English and Urdu have been screened to interpret their grammatical realization, functional significance, thematic progression (McCabe, 1999) and unmotivated displacements of nominalized themes. The results show that the grammatical realization of nominalized themes in English and Urdu varies due to the verbs marked with gender and numbers. Additionally, the English and the Urdu nominalized themes go parallel in theme markedness but the difference is observed when the thematic information units become rhematic information units.