The Patterns Of Thematic Progression In Bing Xin's Short Stories

Stylistics is the linguistic study of style. It is an area of study which straddles two disciplines: literary criticism and linguistics. It takes literary discourse as its object of study and uses linguistics as a means to that end.This dissertation tries to carry out a linguistic survey of Bing Xin's short stories, which is based on the theories of Halliday's systemic grammar, in order to search for significant features on cohesion (thematic progression and zero theme) and context (theme selection) in Bing Xin's short stories by means of a quantitative method. It attempts to find some writing features in Bing Xin's short stories and to explain how it relates to artistic functions of the text from the perspective of linguistics and stylistics.Altogether fifteen short stories are chosen as data sources, including about 2041 clauses. They are selected from the book《冰心小说》published by Zhejiang Literature Publishing House in 2000. Each of them is numbered from 1# to 15#. The fifteen short stories were written by Bing Xin in different periods of time. The research is carried out in a statistics method accompanied by observation. The result of the analysis is calculated in terms of percentage.From the research, it was found that the analysis and descriptions of style in terms of Theme theory and three metafunctions of language provide us with an objective understanding of the factors to decide style in these short stories. The research indicates that narrative perspective which is caused by theme selection is closely related to literature effect and interpretation of a text. The textual function realized by thematic progression and zero theme has a key role in text organization and the artistic effect of the text.