Contrast Analysis Of Theme And Thematic Progression Patterns Between English And Chinese Abstracts Of Scientific Journals

Theme and thematic progression(TP) play an important role in discourse analysis.Studying them not only helps to grasp the essence of the text and to clear the textdevelopments, but also contributes to producing articles coherently in form, in semantic andin logic. This paper analyses the English and Chinese abstract samples taken from keynational and international scientific journals, explores similarities and differences of thematicand TP features between them and investigates the reasons behind the results, based onSystemic Functional Linguistics, Contrastive Linguistics and Genre Analysis. The purpose isto offer numerous professionals some practical advices in text coherence when writingabstracts.This paper is divided into five chapters which are organized as follows:The first chapter is a general introduction. It mainly introduces theme and TP theory,including their concepts and developments. Also, it briefly reviews the present situation oftheme and TP applications in English and Chinese abstracts of scientific journals, finding gapsand insufficiencies and establishing the research focus. Finally, it explains aims andsignificance of this research.The second chapter is the study design. It introduces the theoretical background of thisstudy, including Theme and TP theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics, ContrastiveRhetoric theory and Genre Analysis theory as well as the research methodologies. It alsodescribes the corpus and presents the principles and methods for the corpus construction.The third chapter is theme structure contrasts between English and Chinese abstracts ofscientific journals. It makes analysis and data statistics respectively of English and Chineseabstracts by the Halliday’s theme theory, including simple theme, multiple theme, unmarkedtheme; then it compares the data, finds out similarities and differences of theme applicationsbetween English and Chinese abstracts and gives the reason explanations. The findings showthat (1) the simple theme is used more than the multiple theme is, and the unmarked theme isused more than the marked theme is, both in English and in Chinese abstracts;(2)there is nozero theme in English abstracts, but many in Chinese, which agrees with the characteristicsthat English highlights hypotaxis while Chinese focuses parataxis.The forth chapter is TP contrasts between English and Chinese abstracts of scientific journals. Based on the six TP patterns’ theory by Guowen Huang, firstly it respectivelyanalyzes the six TP patterns of English and Chinese abstract samples and draws their analysischart to demonstrate the procedures and methods in analyzing every TP pattern, illustratingthe process of corpus analysis; secondly, it respectively makes analysis and data statistics ofTP patterns of English and Chinese abstracts to discover their similarities and differences withthe reason explanations given. The findings show that (1) the most widely-used TP pattern inEnglish and Chinese abstracts is the constant rheme pattern, next is the simple linear patternand the constant theme pattern, while the derived pattern and convergence pattern are the leastused;(2) the alternative pattern is more used in Chinese abstracts than in English ones.The fifth chapter is translation strategies of English and Chinese abstracts of scientificjournals. In the light of discussion of the third and forth chapters, it puts forward someprinciples and strategies of the theme and TP patterns for the translation of English andChinese abstracts.