| In functional grammar, theme has been widely studied and proved to be an essential element in discourse analysis. Halliday defined Theme-Rheme structure as "the basic form of the organization of the clause as message". Czech linguist Danes (1974) was the first to put forward the notion of Thematic Progression pattern (TP pattern), explaining clause relations. For any language, there is theme and rheme in its clauses. TP pattern explains the dynamic distribution of theme and rheme in texts. Theme keeps the same in several continual sentences or the previous rheme becomes next theme, forming thematic progression and constituting the coherence of a discourse. Some other linguists also proposed different TP patterns based on different criteria.The author has found that many studies have been conducted in different genres of texts from the perspective of thematic structure and TP patterns, such as news, talk shows, listening materials, documentations, legal texts, etc. In news, the analysis has been focused on disaster news, sports news, maritime news, and economical news. However, no similar study has been made on culture news yet from the perspective of thematic structure and TP patterns. Most researches conduct the comparative study between Chinese and English news, and the analysis of the characteristics for the news published in one particular language. In order to help readers better understand the English culture news, the author selected English newspapers published in China and that in UK as corpus, trying to compare two types of newspapers in thematic structure and TP patterns. The author has selected60passages from China Daily, Guardian, and the Economist. On the theoretical basis of Halliday’s Systemic and Functional Grammar, the Theme and Rheme in each clause are identified. The analysis of TP patterns is built on the classification by Danes and Chinese scholar Zhu Yongsheng.The statistic results show that the two types of news are similar in thematic structure:Clausal theme is the most frequently used theme, Simple theme ranks second, and Multiple theme is the least one. In TP patterns, Constant Theme pattern ranks the first. But there are also differences in pattern usage. This is largely dependent on language style and syntactic structures for two types of newspapers. Besides, the author also discovered that there are some new TP patterns that can be summarized.Finally, the author has made the conclusion for the data and proposed the linguistic and practical implication for this research and its limitations. |
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