The Comparative Studies On Thematic Progression Between English And Chinese

On the purpose of perceiving language, comparison between languages has its roots that could be extended further back than the start of language study in western linguistic field, which has been experiencing great anticipations and expectations since 1920s.With retardation, comparative studies between English and Chinese were not given its deserved attention, since the earmarking publication of Ma Shi Wen Tong in 1898, which discussed differences between English and Chinese. Not until the last decades, for political and economical reasons of the upgrading Chinese status in international environment and its prosperous economy, and for cultural reasons, the long-standing and mysterious Chinese culture greatly attracting westerners, the comparative studies between English and Chinese have grown immensely.However, most of the literature have just conducted comparisons limited in the traditional linguistic perspectives, like phonology, lexicology and grammar by means of quality analysis, with empirical generalizations towards the two languages.As the prevalence of contrastive discourse studies in western linguistic field, this paper attempts to venture into meaningfully fusing discourse and English-Chinese comparison together through quantity analysis of the scientific demonstration. With the aim of conceiving the notion whether text organization by observing Thematic Progression is exhibited differently in the two languages, the writer carefully selected fifty pieces of texts, categorized by five discourse types of narrative, argumentative, expository, descriptive and instructional, most of which were taken from English and Chinese writing textbooks applicable to college students in China. In order for comparison to be possible, the research method accessible to both Chinese and English in this thesis consists of three components: 1) the discourse type, 2) the identification of Theme in each clause, and 3) thematic pattern.By carefully comparing the distributions of thematic patterns in Chinese and English sample texts, one found that all the seven varieties of Thematic Progression occupy every possibility of appearing in the two languages, with the similardistributions of thematic patterns in both languages, and that Constant Theme Pattern and Intersecant Pattern are inclined to the greater possibilities in English discourse, and on the contrary Non-thematic Pattern assumes a higher frequency in Chinese discourse.Therefore, two conclusions have been proposed to elucidate this result: 1) informativity is the core on which discourse is structured, which determines the existence of discourse universal in any language. Consequently, the discourse universal should be attributed to the similarity in Thematic Progressions'distribution between English and Chinese; 2) the cauterization of specific ways of any language community on the discourse determines diversities on text organization between English and Chinese. The higher frequencies of Constant Theme Pattern and Intersecant Pattern represent the linearity of English thinking modes, and the indirectness and fuzziness of Chinese thought influences the greater distribution of Non-thematic Pattern in Chinese language.