A Contrastive Study On Theme And Thematic Progression Patterns Of English And Chinese News Reports

The theory of Theme in systemic-functional linguistics developed from the Prague School approach, and several modifications have been witnessed. However, very few scholars have carried out contrastive studies on Theme and Thematic progression (TP) patterns of English and Chinese news reports. Therefore, this thesis is to conduct a contrastive study on English and Chinese news reports based on Halliday's thematic theory and Danes' thematic progression patterns.Each clause of written texts in any language can be identified as Theme and Rheme. Theme and Rheme in each clause will produce a certain relation and variation, which is known as TP, through which coherence in texts can be realized. There is no exception in English and Chinese.The study aims at comparing and contrasting English and Chinese news reports in terms of Theme and Thematic progression patterns. And the study tries to find out whether English and Chinese news reports tend to use the same Theme and employ the same Thematic progression patterns. If no, what is the difference?Analysis results show that there are overall similarities between English and Chinese news reports in terms of Theme and TP patterns, barring a few differences due to discrepancies between English and Chinese languages. This proves that on the one hand, there is close interrelationship between Theme & TP patterns and genre, on the other hand, Theme and TP patterns can be influenced by different languages despite the same genre.In Chapter One, the author presents a general picture of the research topic.In Chapter Two, the author gives some related definitions. Theme and Rheme defined by Halliday (1994) are adopted. TP, defined by Czech linguist Danes (1974) is accepted. In addition, this chapter reviews the research on Theme and TP patterns both at home and abroad. Danes (1974) originally puts forward three types of TP models. In China, Zhu Yongsheng (1995) ,Xu Shenghuan (1982, 1985) and Huang Yan (1985) respectively provide their own TP patterns. In the following statistics, Zhu's four thematic progression patterns are adopted for data analysis.