Thematic Structure And Thematic Progression Patterns In Chinese And Western Banks’ English Loan Promotion Texts

In current economic globalization,banks exert an important influence on economic development.Following the trend of “going outside”,Chinese banks have placed a priority on English promotion texts of financial products,and lots of scholars have conducted research on English financial promotion texts and have made much progress.Thematic structure and thematic progression(TP)patterns are both effective approaches in analyzing the coherence and functions of texts,and thus can be used for the comparative analysis of Chinese and Western English financial promotion texts.Previous studies on thematic structure were mostly based on the research of thematic features,and studies on TP patterns mainly focused on the texts of different genres and comparative studies from cross-linguistic view.This thesis aims to explore the similarities and differences in thematic structure and TP patterns between Chinese and Western banks’ English loan promotion texts based on two self-built corpora,with qualitative and quantitative research methods.The qualitative research method is employed in the identification of Theme,thematic features,TP patterns and semantic labels,and the explanation of the use of thematic structure and thematic progression patterns in the two corpora.The quantitative research includes the calculation of the number of thematic features and TP patterns,and the independence tests of thematic features and TP patterns between two corpora.Three research questions are pointed out in this study:1.What thematic features do Chinese and Western banks’ English loan promotion texts have?2.How are TP patterns employed in Chinese and Western banks’ English loan promotion texts?3.What factors contribute to their respective use of thematic features and TP patterns in the bank loan promotion texts?The results of the study conducted in this thesis indicate that four thematic features(i.e.theme length,theme function,theme plurality,and experientialcategories of topical themes)show significant differences between the two corpora.With regard to the eight TP patterns found in the two corpora,significant differences are detected in the Constant Theme,Simple Linear and Spring pattern.Moreover,the reasons for the similarities and differences of TP patterns between the two corpora lie in the socio-historical factor,text structure,linguistic system,cultural context and thinking patterns.This study can provide some implications for English teaching,especially writing and reading of this type of texts,and financial text translation.