Move Setting And Thematic Progression In Introductions Of Linguistic Journal Articles: A Corpus-based Study

Research article plays a crucial role in academic communication,with the function of promoting knowledge dissemination and reflecting scholars’ research ability.Introduction,as the opening of research article,serves as a “road map” to help readers get a whole picture of the research issues.How to construct the information of this part has been considered a hard nut to crack in academic writing.Swales’(2004)Create A Research Space(CARS)model describes the rhetorical structure of research article introduction.It has been an effective model for analyzing the macro structure of introduction.Theme theory within the paradigm of systemic functional linguistics reflects the way of information construction in discourse.To date,there has been less research on thematic analysis in academic introduction.This study,incorporating Swales’(2004)Create A Research Space model,Halliday’s(1994)thematic classification model,and Huang Guowen’s(1988)thematic progression patterns as the analytical framework,aims to answer the following questions:1)What are the characteristics of the move setting in research article introductions?2)What are the general features of the thematic choices and thematic progression patterns?3)What are the specific characteristics of thematic choices and thematic progression patterns in three moves?The corpus in this study consists of 60 introductions from four international linguistics journals.The following findings have been obtained by analyzing the move structure and thematic structure.(1)As for the macro structure of the introduction,Move 2(Establishing a niche)has the largest proportion,followed by Move 3(Presenting the present work)and Move 1(Establishing a territory).(2)As for overall use of thematic structure,the frequency of simple theme is significantly higher than that of multiple theme and clausal theme.In the same vein,unmarked theme is also used more frequently than marked one.Among the three categories of multiple theme,experiential theme is favored,followed by textual theme,interpersonal theme is seldom used.Multiple theme is usually realized by the combination of textual and experiential themes.The co-occurrence of the three subcategories is scarce.Additionally,only three thematic progression patterns are found in the corpus,namely,parallel,continuous and derived patterns.Among them,parallel is the most preferred while derived pattern has the least occurrence.(3)All themes and thematic patterns are mainly distributed in Move 2.The preference in the use of simple theme and unmarked theme is consistent in three moves.Clausal theme and marked theme are used least frequently in three moves.With respect to three subcategories of multiple theme in each move,the dominant role of experiential theme is invariant,followed by textual theme.Interpersonal theme is always the least-used one.As for combinations of the three subcategories in each move,in Move 1,single experiential theme occurs frequently,while in Move 2 and Move 3,the combination of textual theme and experiential theme is preferred.About thematic progression patterns,parallel pattern plays a dominant role no matter in which move.In Move 1 and Move 2,derived pattern is the least preferred.In Move 3,continuous pattern shows the least frequency.As demonstrated above,the use of thematic structure correlates with the rhetorical function of each move.Research article introductions tend to use simple language forms to promote the readability.Three thematic progression patterns play a role in parallelism,continuity and extension.All in all,these devices help to promote coherence,logicality and acceptability of the article.This study is significant in guiding readers’ access to generic features and discourse construction strategies in academic discourse.It not only provides a new perspective for genre analysis and thematic analysis,but also facilitates academic reading and writing.