| Chinese speakers, compared with English natives, have more language problems to publish research articles on famous international journals successfully, or participate in international academic communication freely. As for the language problems, just discussing the English texts written by Chinese writers, besides syntactic errors, some textual problems exist. This research focuses on text and exploits thematic theory, one main textual theory, to make a comparative study of thematic realization in master degree theses written by Americans and Chinese, which attempts to find the factors caused the similarities and differences of thematic structure features between Americans and Chinese to help Chinese speakers improve their English performances in international academic world.Halliday’s theories of thematic organization are adopted as the main part of theory foundation. With some other influential scholars’ improvement to this theory, a systematic thematic categorization with three parameters has been identified, that is, simple & multiple Themes, unmarked & marked Themes, and special & non-special Themes, to analyze the selected materials. The analysis materials selected in this research are the Introduction parts of master degree theses written by Chinese non-native and American native speakers, from CNKI and Pro Quest, respectively.A comparative analysis is one approach used in this research, by means of the quantitative and qualitative methodology. The comparative similarities and differences of thematic structure features in three parameters are recorded in following two-fold.Similarities:(1) American and Chinese writers use simple Themes more than multiple Themes, and apply interpersonal Themes and topical Themes in similar amounts.(2) As for the unmarked Themes and marked Themes, Americans and Chinese writers have a slight difference. The types of unmarked Themes they adopt in texts present in a similar trend: subjects> ellipses> WH-elements> predicators. In choosing types of marked Themes, circumstance adjuncts are the most frequent one in both groups, in which place type of circumstance adjuncts occurs more than other adjuncts, and role type of circumstance adjuncts is chosen least.(3) Regarding to the application of special Themes, clefts, existences, and preposed attributes are three types occurring frequently than others in both sets.Differences:(1) The significant differences exist in the occurrences of multiple Themes and textual Themes between the two groups. As data shows, the differences of additive adjuncts, temporal adjuncts and comparative adjuncts as types of textual Themes are also significant. The difference in using topical Themes also exists in subcategories of topical Themes, especially ellipses and adverbial clauses.(2) In thematic structure of unmarked Themes and marked Themes, Americans choose subjects more than Chinese as unmarked Themes; in selecting types as marked Themes, Americans opt for more complements and adverbial clauses, while Chinese choose more circumstance adjuncts and special Themes.(3) Special Themes occur in American native texts less frequently than Chinese non-native texts, and as to the subcategories of special Themes, the distributions of clefts, pseudo-clefts, inverted clefts, and preposed attributives are wider in American texts than Chinese ones.Besides, some factors causing such similarities and differences are analyzed from the aspects of second language acquisition, cognitive habits and target language operability. In addition, all results of this research can be used to explain what well-formed academic writings in English are like from the teaching and learning angles. Therefore, this research lays a foundation for scholars to make theoretical and practical exploration further. |
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