RUME 28
2026
Alexandria, Virginia
How Proofs Are Organized: A Systemic Functional Linguistics Theme Analysis
Page: 1238
We present a preliminary linguistic analysis of how proofs are organized. In particular, we performed a Theme analysis—an analysis from systemic functional linguistics (SFL) that identifies the starting points of messages at the level of independent clauses—on proofs from undergraduate textbooks. Theme analysis is one of the ways in which SFL studies the textual metafunction, that is, how texts are organized to relate to their context. Our preliminary results show that the main marked (i.e., unusual) Theme constructions in our dataset are: (a) beginning clauses with Adjuncts, and (b) beginning clause complexes with dependent clauses. Further, we found that textual elements (e.g., thus, so, since, if) were common as part of multiple Theme constructions.