5. This study

5.1 Method

In this study Halliday's SFG-model is used to analyse the Theme in each individual clause (both independent and dependent clauses, see section 5.1 below). According to the Systemic Functional Grammar model, language is said to fulfil three overarching functions: the ideational metafunction, the interpersonal metafunction and the textual metafunction. In this paper only the textual metafunction is dealt with, which is the use we make of language to form texts (spoken or written). The clause can also, however, be contextualized in terms of all three of its metafunctional perspectives. The Theme can thus have textual, interpersonal, and ideational stages [5] (Martin, Matthiessen and Painter (1997, p.22)).

5.2 Material

The data consist of 24 personal homepages of American Ph.D. students in the humanities (mainly linguistics). The homepages were selected to investigate how students in academia are using homepage discourse.

The homepages have been collected principally by using various search engines on the Internet, for example www.yahoo.com or www.google.com. Universities were also located and from there it was possible to search for Ph.D. students' personal homepages. It is important to emphasize that the official presentations (i.e. template presentations) of the Ph.D. students, which are quite common at most universities, were not of interest here since these presentations are often written in a certain standardized style. Therefore, only the personal homepages which were written by the students themselves and linked to the university sites were collected and focused on.

Following Döring's (2002) classification of homepages, the data of this study fall into the category of expressive, intrinsically motivated homepages since the Ph.D. students are making their own person the topic of their homepages [6].

Instances of continuous texts on the pages, were collected. Homepages which did not consist of any continuous text were excluded (e.g. pages with only lists of information). The continous texts are mainly found on either the index page, which is the very first page of the whole homepage, or on the page following the index page depending on the design of the homepage. The texts vary in length from a few sentences up to about twenty sentences or more, all connected to form a unified whole on the homepage.

Below are two screenshots (Figure 1 and 2) of one of the homepages to illustrate an example from the data. The screenshots are followed by Table 1 which describes the typical homepage features found in the whole sample, i.e. the 24 homepages.

Figure 1: Index-page of Betsy Barry(http://www.arches.uga.edu/~bbarry/)

Figure 2: Betsy Barry's 'About Me' page(http://www.arches.uga.edu/~bbarry/)

Table 1: Type of personal information present (*These features are sometimes a part of the CV)

Table 1 shows that the five most popular items in the homepage sample for this study are, in descending order, name, e-mail, CV, photos, address [7].

5.3 Text, texture and discourse

According to Halliday & Hasan (1976, p.1), the word 'text' is used in linguistics to refer to "any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole". Furthermore, a text is a semantic unit, which means that it is a unit of meaning as well as a unit of form. What distinguishes a text from a non-text is that it has texture. The texture of a text is created by the cohesive relations that exist between various linguistic units in the text. The one specific kind of meaning relation that is exceptionally defining for texture is the way one linguistic element is interpreted in relation to or by reference to another linguistic unit.

Structure is one of the most important means for expressing texture. Grammatical units such as clauses and sentences are 'cohesive' in the sense that they are all structured mainly to provide the reader with resources to create 'coherence' of the text. This paper studies the Theme as a central linguistic unit in the homepage texts. By investigating what gets to be the Theme, we can discover how Thematic choices contribute to the cohesion and coherence of a text (Eggins (1994, p.300)). Since coherence is in the minds of the writer and reader (Thompson (1996, p.147)) an analysis of text will increase our comprehension of how the linguistic system enables writers and readers to produce and process coherent meaning. Thus this study is concerned more broadly with what resources of the English language are used for creating texture in personal homepages.

Both Halliday (1994) and Fairclough (1992) view the clause as the main unit of grammar, which can be combined to make up complex sentences and texts. Each clause is seen as multifunctional, having a combination of textual, ideational, and interpersonal (i.e. identity and relational) meanings. All discourse participants make choices (consciously or unconsciously) when they construct their clauses (e.g. about structure and content); they also make choices of how to construct social identities, social relationships, knowledge and beliefs. Through the SFG-framework (cf. Halliday (1994), Eggins (1994), Thompson (1996)) it is possible to provide a clear view of how language users structure their clauses and texts which leads to a better understanding of how identity is built up or constructed in various types of discourses, like for example homepage discourse.