THEME AND RHEME IN EDITORIAL TEXTS OF THE JAKARTA POST

This thesis deals with Theme and Rheme in Editorial Texts of the Jakarta Post. The objectives are to find out the dominat Theme and Rheme used in the editorial text of the Jakarta Post, to explore and to describe the patterns of Theme and Rheme in Indonesian newspaper editorial texts written in English. Specifically the study treats realization Theme and Rheme, thematic development, and the implication of the use of Theme and Rheme in the newspaper. This study is based on a descriptive method which focuses on the natural characteristics of data and the data resulted are descriptions of actual language. The population was assumed to be all the Jakarta Post editorials with sample texts of its publications through July to August 2008 where six different editions were selected as the sample. The research findings indicate that Marked Theme is mostly used.The reason for the dominant occurrence of the Marked Theme is that the use of colloquialism or spoken language. Specifically, the text is spoken mode rather that written one. It should be borne in mind that the medium is written. Thematic development type five is the dominant thematic development used in the texts. The use of spoken language is contextually motivated with three reasons. They are real life situation, English is a foreign language and news source and objectivity.