Matthiessen's Clause System Of Culmination

Matthiessen (1995: 105):

Consequently, these strategies bring the information within the domain of those textual systems that operate within the clause — THEME and CULMINATION (see further, Chapter 6 below); and the information can be given a textual status as (part of) Theme or as (part of) Culminative.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, the system of CULMINATION is the work of Matthiessen, not Halliday, and it is proposed as the writing counterpart to the system of INFORMATION in speech, except that, unlike INFORMATION, it is a system of the clause, and its informational prominence is always located in the Rheme. Matthiessen (1995: 600):

CULMINATION is the resource for assigning informational prominence in writing in terms of newsworthiness to constituents in the clause. Culminative status is realised by the relative ordering of elements towards the end of the clause. In speech, the corresponding system is INFORMATION, which assigns the information unit a Given+ New structure; the New is realised phonologically, more specifically by intonational prominence (the location of the major pitch movement of a tone group). CULMINATION complements the thematic status assigned by Theme. Once the local context has been established, the issue is what the main point of information is.