Analysis On The Thematic Structure And Tp Patterns Of Commentary Discourses In Business Journals

Editorials as a sub-variant of news reporting discourse have been regarded as an important language resource for discourse study. Business editorials discussed in the present study mostly appear in business newspapers and journals and are found to embed a significant role in presenting the latest particular phenomenon or problems concerning economy or business, aiming at giving deep analysis on the issue and digging out the potential relationship with the others so that the writer’s opinion and argument can be transmitted to the public. To realize this, writers of business editorials tend to weave their language structure carefully and logically, which organizes words and paragraphs in a lexically and semantically meaningful way and thus injects persuasive power into the discourse. It is the stand and destination for this study to approach business commentary discourses, business editorials in particular, from a thematic perspective, trying to reveal the most favored Thematic Progression patterns for this genre and figure out their actual function and effect in facilitating the editorial writers to accomplish the language functions ideationally, interpersonally, or textually.This study is based on the thematic theory firstly put forward by F. Danes and the metafunctional theory of the Systemic Functional Grammar raised by M. A. K. Halliday. The study is carried out by examining30commentary discourses extracted from three internationally circulated business journals, i.e. Financial Times, New York Times and Wall Street Journals. The small scale corpus is carefully probed into in searching for thematic features for business editorials, and the investigation is processed in different spheres with clauses taken as basic units of interpretation. The job of identifying Themes is directed by the classification criteria of markedness, complexity, function and experiential content of Themes. By applying a research method of qualitative study combined with quantitative study, three questions are to be addressed to:1) What are the thematic features of business editorials?2) What are the most frequently employed Thematic Progression patterns in BEs? And,3) How does particular TP pattern help to construe the writers’argument or persuasion in a logic way? Answers to the first two questions are drawn based on statistical demonstration and illustration, and that to the third question is illuminated in a case study. In reference to the Thematic Progression patterns summarized by Danes and later revised by Chinese linguist Zhu Yongsheng, the author of the present study is able to discover the mostly employed progression patterns in business editorials, i.e. the Spring pattern, the Continuous pattern, and the Same Theme pattern; other patterns such as Split Rheme, Same Rheme and Rheme Integration appear at lower frequency. Their function in assisting editorial writers to achieve language goals are explained in detail in the present study.