Marked Themes in academic writing - a comparative look at the sciences and humanities

Oct 17, 2026

Differences between science writing and humanities writing often manifest as noticeable glosses in guidebooks, yet empirical comparisons of these genres remain limited. This study examines how the Hallidayan marked Theme (MT) highlights contextual information in the sciences and humanities. Using a corpus of 80 research articles (40 per domain), MTs are analyzed for grammatical forms and functions. Results show similar MT proportions but distinct clause choices, with science favoring Cause MTs and humanities using more Contingency and Angle.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages21

Reading Time53 min

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Introduction

Marked Themes in academic writing

Alvin Ping Leong* Marked Themes in academic writing: a comparative look at the sciences and humanities [https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2022-0188](https://doi.org/10.1515/text-2022-0188) Received December 8, 2022; accepted January 11, 2024; published online January 23, 2024 Abstract: Diﬀerences between science writing and humanities writing often appear as glosses in guidebooks, but empirical studies comparing these two genres of writing are uncommon. This study investigated the use of a highlighting mechanism – the Hallidayan notion of the marked Theme (MT)– to understand how the sciences and humanities foreground contextual information, and what this implies about the nature of writing in these two broad disciplines. The corpus comprised 80 research articles, 40 each from the sciences and humanities. MTs were analyzed for their grammatical forms and functions using the Hallidayan framework. The ﬁndings revealed that while both genres of writing had roughly the same proportions of MTs used, they diﬀered in their use of thematized clauses. More non-ﬁnite clauses were found in science writing, and more ﬁnite clauses inhumanities writing. Science writing favored the use of Cause MTs, whereas humanities writing used more Contingency and Angle MTs. These ﬁndings suggest that science writing values brevity and authorial presence. Humanities writing, by contrast, prefers a more elaborate writing style, with a focus on establishing the conditions needed for the authors’ interpretations, and integrating the viewpoints from other scholars. Suggestions for further research involving other disciplines and multi-disciplinary ﬁelds of study are recommended. Keywords: marked Themes; systemic-functional grammar; academic writing; genre; sciences; humanities 1 Introduction Over the years, empirical studies on academic writing have yielded much insight into its purpose and structure. These have included invaluable work tracing the *Corresponding author: Alvin Ping Leong, Language & Communication Centre, Nanyang Technological University, 48 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 639818, Singapore, E-mail: [alvin.leong@ntu.edu.sg](alvin.leong@ntu.edu.sg) 2 Leong development of scholarly writing through the ages (Bazerman 1988; Kronick 1962) as well as the ground-breaking studies by Swales (1981, 1990) on the rhetorical structure of research articles. A cursory survey of the literature, however, reveals that such eﬀorts have tended to focus more on science writing. For instance, Halliday and Martin (1993) have shown how science writing relies heavily on nomenclature (e.g.,“chemotaxis”, “relaxion dark matter”) and nominalization (e.g., “a lack of identiﬁcation of transformation products”), resulting in writing that is dense and frequently inaccessible to the lay reader. Indeed, its focus on concepts, entities, and outcomes characterize it as being object-and thing-oriented (Kinneavy 1980; Wilkinson 1992) . Similar work on humanities writing has been more modest, and descriptions about this latter variety of writing are often reduced to glosses in commentaries and guidebooks. The following, for instance, is found in a short paper by Grech (2019) on the broad diﬀerences in styles between the two varieties of writing: The sciences attempt to objectively and incrementally explore the material universe through controlled and reproducible experiments. A novel and single interpretation of observed phenomena is sought on which new experiments are then generated. [ ] The humanities, on the other hand, explore the self, emotions, and humanity by analysing and re-analysing complete units (such as narratives). Subjective self-expression is privileged, with style being of overriding concern, believing that there may be many truths. (Grech 2019: 96) Such glosses characterize science writing and humanities writing as diﬀerent genres. A genre is understood here as a schema of language use that reﬂects the shared norms and practices of the discours

FAQs

What is the main focus of the study?

The study focuses on how marked Theme (MT) choices help foreground contextual information in science and humanities writing.

How was the corpus constructed and analyzed?

The corpus contained 80 research articles, 40 from the sciences and 40 from the humanities, and MTs were analyzed using the Hallidayan framework by examining their grammatical forms and functions.

What key differences were found between the two genres?

Both genres used MTs in roughly similar proportions, but they differed in how they used thematized clauses: science writing used more non-finite clauses, while humanities writing used more finite clauses, along with different MT types (Cause for sciences; Contingency and Angle for humanities).

Oct 17, 2026

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