A Comparative Study On Theme And TP Patterns In Chinese And American Constitutions

Based on the Halliday's thematic theory and Danes' TP theory,the linguists all over the world have done many researches on TP,and this thesis sums up ten TP patterns employed for analysis in this study,i.e.simple linear pattern,constant theme pattern,concentrated pattern,cross pattern,spring theme pattern,spring rheme pattern,irregular pattern,combined pattern,split rheme pattern and split theme pattern according to the classifications of Danes and Xu Shenghuan.The corpus of this study consists of 20 Chinese texts chosen from the current Constitution of the People's Republic of China and 20 English texts selected from the original Constitution of the United States.For the sake of authenticity and validity,the 40 texts are selected randomly and derived from the website of Pkulaw.According to a comprehensive analysis of the samples,it is found that there exist ten TP patterns in both the Chinese constitution and the American constitution and there are many similarities and some differences in the distribution of TP patterns between the Chinese constitution and the American constitution.Moreover,the thesis further explores the possible factors for the existence of these similarities and differences in the term of genre,coherence,syntax,linguistic typology,thinking patterns,cultures etc.Even there exist inevitable limitations during the research,the results of study can exhibit the utilization of TP patterns in the Chinese constitution and American constitution to some degree,which prospectively may contribute to the comparative study of the Chinese and English legal texts in writing and translating.