Construction of the THEME System of Myanmar
The main purpose of this paper is to construct the THEME system of Myanmar following the system network for Theme in English proposed by Halliday (1985, 1994; Halliday and Matthiessen 2004, 2014) within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. It is found that the THEME system of Myanmar consists of two sub-systems: Theme status and Theme composition. For the former, there are two major types: unmarked and enhanced Themes, while for the latter, Theme can be presented in two ways: simple and multiple Themes. Unmarked Themes in Myanmar clauses are Subject, Complement, Adjunct, hypotactic clause, Predicator (only in imperative), and Ba-element (only in interrogative). The enhanced Theme in Myanmar contains two major types: equative or preposed attribute. Multiple Theme includes textual, interpersonal and topical Themes which can be chosen as a point of departure of the clause. The findings may shed light on the realization of the textual metafunction of Myanmar language.
