Thematic Characteristics of the Orientation Part of the English Version of Hikayat Deli Text

As the first part of a narrative text, orientation should be able to attract the readers’ attention; therefore, it must be well organized. From the Systemic Functional Linguistics point of view, a well-organized text can be confirmed through its textual metafunction realized in theme and rheme. In addition to confirming a good organization of the clauses, theme-rheme interactions would make the text interesting. This paper aims at describing the thematic characteristics of the orientation of the English version of Hikayat Deli text (the translated text of Hikayat Deli). This study employed the data derived from the orientation part of the English version of Hikayat Deli text which was analyzed using content analysis. The results of data analysis showed that: (1) unmarked themes dominated the use of theme in the orientation part of the English version of Hikayat Deli text, (2) the story characters (participants) were used most frequently as the clause themes, and (3) conjunctions and conjunctives (textual themes) were the elements of multiple themes most frequently used in the orientation part of the English version of Hikayat Deli text. It is concluded that the choice of theme elements helps in constructing a well-organized orientation and in facilitating the easy understanding to readers of what the rest of the text is about.


INTRODUCTION
Narrative, a text whose social function is to entertain its readers, is composed of three-part generic structure, i.e., orientation, complication, and resolution (Rosa et al., 2008). As the first part of a narrative, just like acknowledgment in writing theses and dissertations (Nguyen, 2017), orientation plays a very important role in attracting readers to read the text completely; in other words, it can be used as a measure of successful narrative writing. Orientation provides certain impressions that would attract the readers' interest in reading the whole text. One of the important points in writing an interesting orientation is its theme structure in the sense of how the themes in the orientation clauses interact with one another.
The essential role of theme and rheme in constructing a clause has attracted a number of researchers to conduct a study on it. Previous studies on theme and rheme have different focuses, such as theme markedness (Rosa, 2007a;Sofyan & Tarigan, 2018), thematic progression (Arunsirot, 2013;Jing, 2015;Li, 2011;Rosa, 2007b;Sofyan & Tarigan, 2017;Yunita, 2018), thematic and information structure (Anwar & Amri, 2020;Carter-Thomas, 2002;Potter, 2016). The previous studies mentioned above have tried to find out the characteristics of texts in a certain language or to improve the quality of texts from a textual metafunction point of view. Sofyan and Tarigan (2018), for example, found the frequent use of the simple marked theme as the characteristics of Indonesian news item texts as they put more emphasis on facilitating the readers' understanding of the events presented in the text. Meanwhile, Jing (2015) and Rosa (2007b) focused on how thematic progression would improve the quality of texts.
The previous studies mentioned above suggest that theme-related issues need further investigation to explore how themes work in constructing a cohesive text, and this is a gap that can be filled in by this present study. Previous studies generally focused on how theme patterns and thematic progressions characterized certain text types but did not see how those theme characteristics and their progressions helped in building a cohesive text. This paper, in particular, aims at finding out the thematic characteristics used in the English version of Hikayat Deli text and how the choice of certain theme elements contributes to building the text cohesiveness. Studying thematic characteristics in this text is important to reveal how themes play a big role in presenting a story by keeping the cohesiveness of the ideas in the text. Moreover, the choice of this text can also show how the thematic characteristics of a text may be different in different languages. Meanwhile, the thematic characteristics of the Indonesian version of the Hikayat Deli text have been studied by Nurlela et al. (2017).
More specifically, this paper attempts to answer the following research questions: (i) What is the type of theme dominantly used in the orientation of the English version of Hikayat Deli text? (ii) What is the transitivity element most frequently used as the themes in the orientation of the English version of Hikayat Deli text? (iii) What is the component of theme most frequently used as the themes in the orientation of the English version of Hikayat Deli text?

Theme and Rheme
As the first element of the clause as a message, a theme determines the organization of a clause. As suggested by Martin et al. (1997), a theme is the point of departure of a clause as a message which possesses the initial position in the clause, and as the starting point of the message; it informs what the clause is going to be about (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). Those ideas suggest that the first part of the clause has the most influential factor to the rest of the message in a clause. In other words, putting the same word in a different position of a clause influences the way readers comprehend the message in the clause. The theme of the clause 'Ahmad climbed the mountain', for example, is 'Ahmad', indicating that the choice of rheme must depend entirely on 'Ahmad'. In other words, the theme 'Ahmad' influences the elements of rheme possibly used in that clause. Therefore, the clause 'Ahmad is pregnant' is not acceptable since the rheme 'is pregnant' is not one of the possible choices of rheme for the theme 'Ahmad'.
The other part of the clause is known as rheme. Eggins (1994) says that rheme is the part of the clause in which the theme is developed. Furthermore, Martin et al. (1997) define rheme as the elements of the clause that follows the theme where the presentation moves after the point of departure. Once the theme of a clause is identified, the rheme can be easily recognized. The rheme contains the information that controls the development of the theme in a clause. The role of theme and rheme in a clause is obvious because it would make the text cohesive, facilitating easier understanding of the text to readers. Therefore, determining the elements of the clause themes should be given careful attention.

Kinds of Themes
The choice of certain elements as a clause theme results in two kinds of themes: unmarked and marked themes (Eggins, 1994;Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004;Martin et al., 1997). The unmarked theme is characterized by using a nominal group (e.g., John, my teacher, a beautifully decorated room) as the clause theme, while marked theme contains unusual elements of a theme such as processes (e.g., say, climb, open) or circumstances (e.g., once upon a time, in the classroom, carefully). The choice of unmarked and marked themes also has several consequences. Rosa (2007a) found that an unmarked theme is usually to indicate the writer's agreement with certain issues, while a marked theme tends to be used to show the writer's disagreement.
A theme can contain more than one element. A theme containing only one theme element is called a simple theme, while a theme composed of more than one theme element is called multiple themes (Eggins, 1994;Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). For this classification, the theme is known to be composed of three elements: topical, interpersonal, and textual themes. The topical theme is the main component of the theme which must be used in any clause. It is composed of transitivity elements, including participant, process, and circumstances. An interpersonal theme is optional as it is only used when the theme is multiple. It is composed of vocatives, finites, W-H questions, and mood adjuncts. Meanwhile, the textual theme is composed of conjunctions, conjunctives, continuatives, and W-H relatives (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). The use of simple and multiple themes contributes to the cohesion of ideas presented in a text (Anwar & Amri, 2020;Hasselgård, 2004;Rosa, 2007b). Hasselgård (2004) particularly believes that multiple themes are obviously helpful in keeping the cohesiveness of ideas in a text.
The classifications of themes into several types make it possible to show their respective characteristics in building a text. In other words, a text can be characterized based on the types of themes used in it. A descriptive text, for example, is characterized by the frequent use of an unmarked theme (Knapp & Watkins, 2005). Besides, an exposition text is characterized by the frequent use of simple linear theme progression (Rosa, 2007b). Furthermore, a recount text is characterized by the frequent use of simple unmarked themes and textual themes (Yunita, 2018). Moreover, the importance of identifying typical theme characteristics in different text types has been argued by Ho (2009). Therefore, it is necessary to do a study exploring the use of themes in different kinds of texts, one of which is narrative text. This present study explores the characteristics of themes used in a narrative text, particularly in its orientation part.

Orientation Part in Narrative Text
Orientation is the first part of narrative text that functions to sets the scenes as well as to introduce the participants or the characters in the story (Rosa et al., 2008). Comprehensive introduction of the scenes and the story characters in the orientation influences the success of the whole story (Herlihy, 2011), and there is no other element of a story more vital than character (Weiland, 2010). It is, then, concluded that one of the factors leading to the failure of writing a narrative text is the failure in presenting desirable orientation.
Besides, the other important point in writing an orientation is idea cohesiveness. Introducing the scenes and the characters of the story should be packaged in wellorganized clauses, reflected the right choice of theme in each clause. A number of studies have reported that the right choice of themes leads to a cohesive text (Hasselgård, 2004;Rosa, 2007b;Suwandi, 2016). Therefore, a well-written orientation is one containing a comprehensive introduction of scenes and characters packaged in well-organized clauses.

METHODS
This study was conducted using a content analysis method because it explored the presence of certain words or concepts within a text. As suggested by Bengtsson (2016), this study organized and elicited meaning from the data collected and drew realistic conclusions from it. The data were all the clauses in the orientation part of the English version of Hikayat Deli text. There were three main characters: Bahasyid Sjech Matiyoeddin or called Tuanku Sjah Alam (the King from Deli Akbar and Hindustan), Muhammad Dalik (the King's first son), and Muhammad Darekan (the King's first son); and two minor characters: hulubalang (head of government in the Aceh sultanate) and ministers introduced in the orientation part of Hikayat Deli text. The text was translated from Bahasa Indonesia into English by a professional translator and its quality has been ratified. A table of indicators (see Appendix A) and an interview guideline (see Appendix B) were used as the instruments for collecting the data. The interview with the source text writers was conducted to confirm some technical terminologies used in this English version.
The data were analyzed using a content analysis based on the systemic functional linguistics approach as suggested in several previous studies (Bengtsson, 2016;Briones, 2016;Vaismoradi et al., 2013;Vaismoradi & Snelgrove, 2019). The systemic functional linguistic principles of the theme (textual metafunction) were applied in analyzing the text. The text was broken down into their clauses, and each clause was analyzed for its theme. Clause level analyses were done because they were composed of theme and rheme from which the analyses began. Then, each of the themes was analyzed to investigate their transitivity elements. Meaning elicitation was needed to identify the function of each transitivity element in a clause. Once their function was completely identified, then the findings concerning the dominant type of theme, the transitivity element most frequently used as the theme, and the dominant use of certain theme components were formulated.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The results of this study show that the theme characteristics of the orientation of narrative text can be seen from the type of theme, the component of themes, and the textual theme elements used in each clause.

The Dominant Themes in the Orientation of Hikayat Deli Text
Based on the theme markedness of the clauses, the results of data analysis show that unmarked themes dominate the type of theme used in the orientation part of Hikayat Deli text as shown in Table 1. The results of data analysis presented in Table 1 indicate that unmarked theme is the type of theme most frequently used in the orientation of the text with a frequency of 86%. Meanwhile, the marked theme is much less used with a frequency of 14%. The very frequent use of unmarked theme indicates that the orientation of this text tends to emphasize the introduction of characters rather than the setting (time and place) introduction. This also means that the text tells the story from the character's point of view, considering the characters as the key elements that would attract readers to read the rest of the text. This is in line with Weiland (2010) who argues that there is no other element of a story more vital than character. By placing character as the theme element, the orientation of the text focuses more on 'who was involved in the text' rather than 'where or when the story in the text took place'. The dominant use of the unmarked theme is also found in the news item text. Sofyan and Tarigan (2018) found that 66% of themes in English news item text were unmarked themes since the readers wanted to know what happened in the news. (1) -(3) show the preference of using the characters as the clause themes, indicating the use of unmarked themes.

The clauses in
( The clauses in (1) -(3) contain circumstances of place but none of them serves as the clause themes because all of the themes are participants introducing several characters involved in the text. This emphasizes the important role of characters in the text. The clause theme in (1) introduces 'the king' serving as the main character of the text because he is involved in almost all events mentioned in the text.
Moreover, the clause theme in (2) introduces 'ministers' as part of the leading figures in the kingdom playing their roles in the government system. Meanwhile, the clause theme in (3) introduces 'hulubalang' as the military nobility of the Deli Malay Kingdom.

The Frequent Transitivity Element Used as Themes in the Orientation of the Hikayat Deli Text
The dominant use of unmarked themes indicates that participant is the transitivity element most frequently used as the clause themes in the orientation of Hikayat Deli text. Meanwhile, other transitivity elements, circumstances, and processes are less frequently used as they occupy the theme position in the marked theme clauses. The marked themes in the orientation of the text are composed of more circumstance elements as shown in Table 2. The results of data analysis presented in Table 2 show that 81.25% of the marked themes are composed of circumstances, while the other 18.75% of them are composed of processes. The circumstances used as the themes in the orientation of the text include the circumstance of time, the circumstance of place, the circumstance of the cause, the circumstance of angle, and the circumstance of manner. Circumstances of time and place are used to show the setting of the story, when and where the story took place as seen in (4) and (5) The clause in (4) shows that the story took place a long time ago, during the kingdom era in the history of Deli Malay. The use of circumstance of time as the theme of the first clause of a text is a typical characteristic of narrative texts. Although introducing characters plays the most important role in the orientation, the use of circumstance of time as the theme is more preferable because it serves as the setting element introducing 'when' the story took place. This refers to the nature of the theme as the starting point of the message (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004), the most emphasized point of the message.
Meanwhile, the clause in (5) introduces the place where the story took place, i.e., in the Deli Malay Kingdom. The introduction of the place of the story is very important because it will attract readers who want to know the story from a particular kingdom. The important role of the circumstance of time and place in the orientation of a narrative text is also mentioned by Swanson et al. (2014) that, in addition to characters introduction, orientation contains clauses providing traits or properties of the setting. Such properties refer to space-oriented and time-oriented settings in the orientation of the narrative text. The space-oriented setting emphasizes the spatial surroundings of the story, while the time-oriented setting emphasizes a sequence of actions or events in the story (Pitkänen, 2003).
Furthermore, the use of circumstances of angle in the orientation of the text indicates one of the wise characters of the Deli Malay Kingdom for allowing argumentations in making decisions. One of the uses of circumstances of angle is provided in (6). The clause in (6) is uttered by one of the ministers responding to the king's question. At that time, the king asked for the opinion of the ministers regarding the decision of his son's future. This indicates the implementation of musyawarah (deliberation) in the Deli Malay Kingdom. This is quite rare to happen in a classical kingdom era where a king used to be known as an authoritarian who only wanted to be heard but never wanted to listen. Such wise characteristics are important to be highlighted in the orientation to attract readers to explore how wise the king was in the story.
In addition to circumstance elements as the clause themes, the marked themes composed of processes are also found in the orientation of Hikayat Deli text. Nevertheless, all of the processes are verbal processes, usually accompanying the dialogue in the text. One of the examples of using a process as the theme can be seen in (7). The clause in (7) uses verbal process 'ordered' as the clause theme to emphasize that the main point of the message to be conveyed in the process of ordering. This is particularly important since the text is about the story of a king, who is certainly characterized as the kingdom ruler. The use of process as the theme in the orientation shows that the story contains a variety of orders delivered, particularly, by the king. In addition, by the use of process as the clause theme, the text also introduces the wise characteristics of the king for allowing his people to provide comments or suggestions as shown in (8).  The findings presented in Figure 1 show that the multiple unmarked themes (MUT) are used most frequently in the orientation of the text. Unlike MUT, the multiple marked themes (MMT) are the type of theme least frequently used. Meanwhile, 31 % of the clauses are composed of simple unmarked themes (SUT), and the other 10% of the clauses are composed of simple marked themes (SMT).

The Frequent Component of Themes in the Orientation of the Hikayat Deli Text
The very frequent use of multiple themes shows that the orientation of Hikayat Deli text is very careful in leading the readers' understanding of the text. In addition, the frequent use of multiple themes indicates well-organized ideas that help accomplish the intended purpose of the text (Brown, 2004) and make the text easily understood (Suwandi, 2016). The ideas are well arranged through the use of conjunctions and conjunctives showing how the ideas are interrelated. In addition to conjunctions and conjunctives (the elements of textual themes), the multiple themes are also composed of the elements of interpersonal themes, i.e., vocatives and W-H questions. The findings of different frequency of textual themes and interpersonal themes used in the orientation of the text are presented in Table 3. The results of the study presented in Table 3 show that textual theme is the component of theme that is dominantly used in the orientation of the text with a frequency of 83.1%. This is in line with the function of textual theme as the theme component that arranges ideas presented in the text based on their logical relationship. This logical relationship builds the cohesiveness of ideas in the text. This also supports Suwandi (2016) who argues that the cohesiveness of ideas presented in a text is identified through their logical relationship. Meanwhile, interpersonal themes are less frequently used in the orientation of text with a frequency of 16.9%. This is motivated by the nature of orientation of narrative text that contains less dialogue among the characters in the text.
The conjunctions and conjunctives, indicating the logical relationship of one clause to another clause, used in the orientation showed both paratactic and hypotactic relationships. The paratactic relationship is indicated through adversative paratactic extension (but), additive paratactic extension (and, in addition, moreover), causalconditional paratactic enhancement (so), and temporal paratactic enhancement (then). Meanwhile, the hypotactic relationship is indicated through causal-conditional hypotactic enhancement (because, that, so that, if, even if), temporal hypotactic enhancement (once, while, when), and manner hypotactic enhancement (as). The clauses in (9) -(11) are examples of the uses of textual themes.  The clause in (9) uses conjunctive 'Then' as the textual theme to show the temporal meaning since the clause is used to show that there is a break before the next event or response 'keeping silent' took place. Without using such conjunctive, the logical relationship of this clause with the previous one 'I will let you know, my son' is not clear. The clause in (10) is used to contrast the message contained in the previous clause 'the king's sons leaving for other kingdoms/countries'. Using the conjunction 'but' makes it easier for readers to understand the relationship among the clauses. The logical meaning enhanced in this clause is that the clause conditionally agrees with the previous message as long as the condition mentioned in the clause in (11) is fulfilled. Such condition is realized by the use of the conjunction 'if'.
Providing causal-conditional hypotactic enhancement in the orientation indicates some conflicts that would arise in the complication part of the text. In other words, the conflict would be related to the king's decision to let his sons leave for other countries or the consequences of the king's decision of letting his sons leave. Showing hypotactical logical relationship in introducing characters and settings of the story is one of the principal reasons why the orientation of the text is constructed by employing a large number of conjunctions.
Furthermore, the multiple themes in the orientation part of the Hikayat Deli text are also composed of vocatives and W-H questions (interpersonal themes). The use of vocatives in the orientation indicates that the text contains a lot of dialogues in delivering its ideas or in presenting the story. Most of the vocatives in the orientation are addressed to the king and his sons. Some of the examples of using vocatives can be seen in (12) and (13). The clause theme in (12) is the vocative addressed to the king 'Your Highness Tuanku Sjah Alam'. This is a frozen style of greeting the king whenever people want to say something to their king. As this text is about the story of the Deli Malay Kingdom, such vocative will be frequently found in the rest of the text. This is the reason why this vocative is also used in the orientation. Meanwhile, the clause theme in (13) contains a vocative used by the king while talking to his son. Such vocative is an informal greeting, showing the intimacy between the king and his sons. The use of this vocative indicates that the king has to be able to play a number of roles: as a father, as a husband, and as a leader.
As the initial part of the narrative text, the orientation of Hikayat Deli text introduces the text through typical theme characteristics. The typical theme characteristics of the orientation are: (1) the dominant use of unmarked theme, realized in more multiple themes, (2) the frequent use of the story characters (participants) as the theme, and (3) the dominant use of conjunctions and conjunctives (textual themes) as the elements of textual themes. These typical theme characteristics present a wellorganized orientation of this text.
The dominant use of unmarked themes in the orientation is related to the tone of the text. Generally, the first part of the text does not contain emotional statements because it serves as the introduction to what the rest of the text is about. This is in line with Rosa (2007a) arguing that unmarked themes are usually used in the text containing supportive statements. The unmarked themes show the ordinary order of a clause containing the 'participant^process' order. Besides, readers would have a better understanding when reading clauses constructed by a common order. However, the finding of this study is in contrast with the results of the study done by Nurlela et al. (2017) who found that marked themes were dominantly used in the Indonesian version of Hikayat Deli text. The difference is motivated by the characteristics of Indonesian stories which tend to use circumstances and processes as the clause themes.
The dominant use of multiple themes in the orientation indicates a wellorganized text for showing how the meanings contained in the clauses are interrelated. In addition, the use of multiple themes, particularly those composed of interpersonal themes, indicates that the text would present a number of dialogues, making the story livelier. Mokhtar et al. (2011) found the very important role of dialogues in a text; once they are changed to a narration, the story would lose its life. Besides, it also shows several characteristics of the story characters in terms of how they greet or call others. However, this finding is in contrast with Sofyan and Tarigan (2018) who found that the simple theme is the dominant type of theme in a news item text. The difference is caused by the different types of the text studied. A news item text is characterized by lexical richness, suggesting the frequent use of simple linear progression where most of the themes are derived from the previous clause rhemes. Meanwhile, a narrative text is organized in chronological order, suggesting that the clauses have to show the interrelationships between and among the events mentioned in the story.
The preference of using the story characters as the theme is caused by the key role of characters in a story. It can be said that there will be no story without any character. The vital role of characters leads to the statement that characters must be found in any central events mentioned in the story (Riedl & Young, 2010). This is also the reason why the orientation of Hikayat Deli text uses unmarked themes most frequently. Most of the unmarked themes used in the orientation contain the story characters, meaning that they are intended to introduce the story characters to readers.
The dominant use of conjunctions and conjunctives as the elements of textual themes shows how the orientation tries to provide a logical relationship between and among the clauses. In addition to facilitating the easy understanding to readers, the logical relationships generated from the use of conjunctions and conjunctives would give some assumptions of logical relationships that would be retold in the text.
The findings of this study have implications for the organization of ideas in a text. The decision to use an unmarked theme more dominantly in the orientation is motivated by the function of orientation that introduces the characters and the setting of the story. Introducing characters focuses on the first participants (formally known as the subject), instead of the actions or circumstances. This is realized by the use of an unmarked topical theme. Nevertheless, the clauses in the orientation also need to introduce the time and the place where the story took place, for which circumstances need to occupy the theme position. Using circumstances as the theme is called a marked topical theme. This implies that all theme types are needed in constructing a well-organized orientation since the use of unmarked themes in all clauses makes the orientation sound awkward because the ideas are not cohesive. The orientation will look like a collection of jumbled clauses. Furthermore, the dominant use of multiple themes in the orientation shows the writers' effort to confirm the cohesiveness of ideas through their logical relationship. This supports the idea of Hasselgård (2004) who argues that multiple themes are obviously helpful in keeping the cohesiveness of ideas in a text.
Furthermore, the findings of this study have implications for teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) in Indonesia, especially in teaching a narrative text. Teaching a narrative text should emphasize the cohesiveness of ideas presented in the text through careful attention to the thematic structure of its clauses. The themes chosen in each clause should reflect the flow of the story and the logical relationship among the ideas.

CONCLUSION
As a narrative text, the English version of Hikayat Deli text tries to achieve its social function, i.e., to entertain its readers, by paying careful attention to its thematic structure in the orientation part. The frequent use of unmarked themes in the orientation part of this text shows the paramount role of characters in the text because characters would be found in every central event presented in the other parts of the text. Besides, the frequent use of multiple themes in the orientation part of this text confirms a well-organized orientation and provides initial ideas of what the rest of the story is about. The multiple themes in the orientation of this text are composed mainly of conjunctives and conjunctions. This paper only focuses on the orientation part of the Hikayat Deli text. It is just a small part of the whole text. Thus, the theme characteristics found in this study cannot be generalized as the theme characteristics of this text. Therefore, other researchers who are interested in analyzing this text can continue this study by focusing on its other parts, such as on the complication part or resolution part. Furthermore, this study only focuses on the types of themes and elements of the theme, so other studies can continue this study by analyzing the thematic progression used in this text. Moreover, this study only focuses on the textual metafunction of language realized in this text. This invites other researchers to analyze the realization of ideational and interpersonal metafunction in the Hikayat Deli text.  Multiple themes Composed of more than one theme element