Examining the Construction of Thematic Structures in Middle Persian Texts from the Perspective of Textual Themes of Halliday’s Approach

This study investigates the thematic structure in Middle Persian Texts based on Halliday’s approach. Accordingly, it could be investigated that what changes have happened in the thematic structure during the process of Language development. Halliday and Matthiessen (2014) claim that the theme is the point of departure. In order to do this study, two texts of kārnāmag i ardešir bābakān (Text 1) and dinkar šašom (Text 2) were chosen. The results suggest that the highest occurrence of themes belongs to the unmarked multiple theme (almost 65% in both texts) with the pattern of “Textual theme + Topical theme” (70.27% in Text1 and 60.83% in Text2). Based on this fact it could be claimed that in that era this pattern was used to transfer the message.