A Contrastive Study Of Thematic Progression Patterns In English And Chinese Financial Reports

This thesis, based on the thematic progression (TP) theory, aims to conduct a contrastive study of the TP patterns exploited in the English and Chinese financial reports so as to find out the similarities and differences in the adoption of TP patterns used in the financial reports of both languages. And its ultimate purpose is to explore the underlying reasons that cause these common features and divergences.Thematic progression, proposed by Danes, is concerned with the relations and variations produced by the theme and rheme of the clauses. According to Halliday, each sentence can be identified as the theme part and the rheme part. With the progression of the texts, the previous theme or rheme would become the following theme or rheme, and these relations and variations are called Thematic Progression which mainly explains the relationships between clauses and realizes the coherence of the texts.After a closer look at the previous studies, the writer found that there are several contrastive studies about TP patterns in the field of comprehensive news report, law texts, scientific texts, disaster coverage texts and entertainment news reports, but no study has been done in the field of financial reports. In order to improve the composition and comprehension of the English and Chinese financial reports, the author makes a tentative study in such a field.The current paper employs the methods of contrastive, quantitative and qualitative analysis to analyze the distributions of TP patterns in all the samples collected in the present corpus with ten pieces of English financial reports and ten pieces of Chinese ones. In the end, several similarities and differences are found:1.Similarities: 1)English and Chinese financial reports employ the same TP patterns.2) The most popular TP patterns occur in both languages are the constant theme, the concentrated pattern and the simple linear whose percentages are all more than 20%.3) Irregular pattern occurs rarely in both English and Chinese financial reports.2. Differences:1) The sequences of proportions of the seven TP patterns in English and Chinese financial reports are different:the sequence in English is T-T>R-T>R-R>T-R>T+R-R>T+R-T>IP while the order in Chinese is T-T>R-R>R-T>T-R>T+R-T>T+R-R>IP.2) The percentages of a certain TP pattern in both languages are slightly different.Finally, the author fully explains the reasons giving rise to those similarities and differences from the perspectives of genre, cognition, linguistic typology and different thinking patterns.