A Study On The Distribution Of Thematic Progression Patterns In English Editorials

2008 the Olympic year is not only going to be a year the world gets a further understanding of China, but also a year China can know the world deeper. As throat of public opinion, and soul of newspaper, editorials are an important way to enhance understanding. Therefore, the study of structures of English editorials is of special importance.As one of the three meta-functions of the systemic functional grammar, the textual meta-function is realized by thematic structure, information structure and cohesion. The combination of content and form in texts are embodied in thematic progression. The interesting thematic coherence and the logical relevance of a text are represented by thematic progression. And the arrangement of themes and rhemes can also help readers figure out the main content and information distribution of a given discourse. Thus to figure out the distribution of thematic progression patterns in English editorials, this thesis carried out an analysis on 18 English editorials. It has the following five chapters:Chapter one introduces the research background of related fields, evaluates the importance of the thesis, proposes the target of this research and lists the structure of this thesis. Chapter two is literature review which introduces the systemic functional grammar theory and the theory of three meta-functions of language. It also expounds the thematic structure theory, and the six thematic progression patterns adopted in this study. At the end, it briefly explains editorial and its structure. Chapter three puts forward research questions hypotheses and detailed research procedures of this study. And it introduces the resources of the corpus of this study. It also presents criteria for the identification of themes, as well as that of thematic progression patterns. Chapter four presents results of discourse analysis, whereby tries to analyze functions of the six thematic progression patterns, and the social cultural factors that may affect the application of thematic progression patterns. The author also briefly evaluates implications of this research to the reading and writing teaching of argumentative texts. Chapter five summarizes the thesis, and suggests the limitations of this research and gives some reasonable suggestions for future studies.