A Contrastive Study on the Thematic Structure Functions of English and Arabic Short Stories

Charles Dickens’s (1909) “Little Dorrit” and Al Tayeb Saleh’s (1997) “Nakhla Ala Al Jadwal” were the subject of this investigation. Using Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2014) model of thematic categorizations and functions, this research paper examined thematic structure functions in relation to Dickens’s and Saleh’s short stories. Hence, 234 English and 304 Arabic clauses were manually extracted from the short stories and analyzed regarding the proposed framework. The findings revealed that the use of topical themes was the highest and the interpersonal was the lowest in frequency while the textual themes were at some point in between the topical and interpersonal ones. The comparison also had no bearing on the topical themes because they were identical, but the textual and interpersonal themes recorded distinct results. In Arabic, the utilization of textual themes was higher but the implementation of interpersonal themes was more employed and exercised in English. Each of which indicates multifarious reasons and functions to be regarded to the author’s vantage point.