| Thematic Progression(TP) is one of the most important devices in analyzingdiscourses.The theory of TP has developed recent years and become one of themainstreams in discourse analysis,with several theoretical results being witnessed.Since news,the carrier of information,is an integral part of people’s lives,muchresearch in the past years has been conducted by the scholars at home and abroad toexplore the using tendencies of the TP patterns employed in news reports.Based on Halliday’s Theme-Rheme theory and Danes’s Thematic Progressiontheory,this study aims to explore the TP patterns employed in Chinese and Englishnews reports.Tentative analyses on the using tendencies of the TP patterns in eachlinguistic type of news report and the underlying reasons causing the differences orsimilarities among these two linguistic types of news report are conducted.Three research questions were chiefly discussed in this paper.They were:1. Howmany possible TP patterns can be employed in each linguistic type of news report?2.Are the TP patterns’ using tendencies in the two linguistic types of news report similar?3. Is there any difference between the Chinese and Enlish news reports in terms oftheir choices of TP patterns? If yes, what is the difference?A small-scaled corpora was built with one hundred and twenty news reportscovering the second half of2012year’s political news, sci-tech news, sports news andentertainment news collected from the most authoritative newspaper and mediaofficial websites at home and abroad such as Guangming Daily, People’s Daily,Xinhua News, The Times and the BBC.The Theme and Rheme in every news and theTP patterns empolyed in each type of news report were identified and analyzed.Analysis results show that there are overall similarities between Chinese andEnglish news reports in terms of their discourse organizational way and their cohesiveway, barring a few differences due to discrepancies between Chinese and Englishlanguages. Comparing the statistical results within the two types of linguistic newsreport respectively, the similarities are found: a. more unmarked themes than markedthemes; b. more simple themes than multiple themes; c. more experiential themes than other types of multiple themes. And also, the differences are found: a. more Chinesemarked themes but more English unmarked themes; b. more theme slots in Chinesethan in English.In terms of their TP patterns, the two types of linguistic news reportshow their similarities: a. the using tendencies of simple linear pattern and constanttheme pattern in Chinese and English news reports are roughly the same; b. TP withconcentration pattern is the most preferred and predominant in both Chinese andEnglish news reports.And the difference is reflected in the sequences of the TPpatterns in the two types of language.From the above all, not only do the result show the similarities and differences inTP patterns exploitation shared by Chinese and English news reports,but also it mightenrich the theories and be helpful for the understanding and writing of news texts. |
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