A Study Of Theme And Thematic Progression Theory And Its Application

Since Systemic Functional Grammar was initiated by Halliday in 1950s, its development has been made in strides by the joint efforts of foreign and domestic linguists, which have exerted immense influence on the field of text analysis, foreign language teaching, and contrastive studies between different languages. The term"theme"in Functional Grammar is originated from the Prague School. It is believed that every clause in any language could be segmented into the theme part and the rheme part. The theme part occurs at the initial position of the clause functioning as the departure of the message, the rheme part being the rest of the clause. The Theme-Rheme structure exists in every clause. The phenomenon that themes follow certain patterns in a coherent discourse to develop the elements preceding them is termed as thematic progression (TP), firstly by Danes, a Czech linguist. Based on his three TP patterns, foreign and domestic scholars have put forward various TP patterns, six of which will be closely examined and applied in this thesis. In a survey of the present research, it is found that thematic and TP theories have been widely applied in the analysis of texts of different genres in different languages. In this study, a contrastive analysis of twenty political speech texts in terms of their thematic choices and thematic progression patterns has been conducted tentatively."Based on the thematic theories put forward by Halliday who holds the first chair in Functional Grammar and six major TP patterns coined by foreign and domestic scholars, this thesis intends to conduct the contrastive study of twenty English and Chinese political speeches. The research results demonstrate the different percentages of occurrences of marked and unmarked themes, simple theme and multiple themes, textual themes and interpersonal themes, and rates of the occurrences of the six TP patterns in the twenty political speeches respectively, thus the author analyzes the possible causes for the major divergences, and suggests, out of this study, possible implications to English writing practice, holding that cohesion in English learners'writing could be achieved by deliberate choices of particular TP patterns.The results of the research indicate that thematic theories and TP patterns functioning as an operable tool of text analysis are applicable for the analysis of political speeches as well. Within the constraint of the same genre, the selected English and Chinese materials share the common grounds that more unmarked theme, simple theme, constant theme pattern and simple linear pattern are employed; meanwhile, being delivered in two different languages, they differ from each other in that Chinese speakers are more inclined to adopt more marked and zero themes, and that more textual themes are adopted in English multiple themes. These divergences, presumably, could be best ascribed to the intrinsic differences rooted in the two languages and the different characteristics of thinking between western and eastern language users. In the concluding part, a summery of the findings, possible enlightenment of this study to English writing teaching, as well as the limitations and suggestions for future study have been elucidated.