A Functional Analysis Of RENCCPC From The Perspective Of Thematic Structure And Thematic Progression Pattern

The concepts of theme and rheme were firstly put forward by the PragueSchool.Then, the Systemic Functional Grammar (Hereinafter referred to as SFG) School,with Halliday as the representative, summerized the previous researches and developed theconcepts. Now scholars from home and abroad still use the thematic structure theory toanalyze texts. In1974, Danes proposed the concept of thematic progression patterns,which has aroused the interests among the scholars. From then on, many researches hadbeen done. The researchers mainly studied advertising texts, medical texts, news reportstexts etc. However, few of them analyzed political texts. Under this circumstances, thisstudy analyzes the English version of Report to the Eighteenth National Congress ofCPC. It will provide a new perspective for the study of political texts.Both the quantitative and qualitative research methods are employed in this study. Wewill identify the types of themes, the types of TP patterns, make a table to show thedistributions of themes and TP patterns. Finally, the conclusion will be drawn. Theresearch questions are as follows: What are the characteristics of thematic structure in theReport to Eighteenth National Congress of CPC? What kind of theme and thematicpatterns occupy the largest percentage in English version of the report? What textualfunctions can they play? How can the dominant type of thematic structure or thematicprogression pattern help organize the text?We have come to the following conclusions: the simple theme is the dominant theme.This is owing to the fact that political texts are objective and rigorous. Besides, thepersonal pronoun "We" appears in high frequency in simple themes. Clausal themes comesnext and multiple themes are relatively less in the RENCCPC. However, only onepredicated theme in the sample text.TP patterns are firstly analyzed according to the basic classification. The results showthat the constant theme is dominant, while constant rheme pattern comes the second. Butif it is analyzed strictly by another12different TP patterns, the CT+DR pattern isdominant, while the basic patterns mentioned above such as constant theme and constantrheme occupy relatively small percentage. The comprehending of the characteristics ofthe TP patterns enables the foreign readers of RENCCPC to understand the texts better.The result of this research shows that the pattern of thematic progression of a text is closely related to its genre. And this also proved Fries’ theory. Thus, to some extent, thisstudy provides a new insight into the studies on thematic structure and thematicprogression. Besides, the method employed in this thesis can also be used to analyzethematic structure and TP patterns in other texts. The research results are also informativeand valuable for the students specializing in translation.