Types, Progression, and Markedness of Theme in The Jakarta Post News on the COVID-19 Outbreak

Abstract

This study aims to find out textual function including the types, progression, and markednes in The Jakarta Post Newspaper on the Covid-19 Outbreak in order to identify how the information in the clause goes on and gives a significant contribution to keeping the text coherent. The texts were analyzed by applying the theory of textual Metafunction proposed by Halliday and Matthiessen (2014). This study used a qualitative approach by using the content analysis. The result of this study shows topical, textual, and interpersonal Themes were found. Moreover, Topical Theme has the highest occurrences (77,3%), followed by the Textual Theme (21,5%), and Interpersonal Theme (1,2%).  Regarding to the occurrences of the Theme Markedness, Unmarked Topical Theme (UMT) has higher occurrences with 91,5% than Marked Topical Theme (MT) with 8,5%. Meanwhile, the Thematic progression analysis shows that the Linear pattern has the highest occurrences with 55,8%, followed by a Constant Pattern with 36,4%, then a Split-Rheme pattern with 5,2%, and the Derived Theme as the lowest occurrences with 2,6%. The highest occurrences of unmarked Topical theme and Linear patterns give that both of them play an important role in creating continuity clauses of the newspaper.