| Since first proposed by Prague School, the theory of Theme has now become animportant part of textual metafunction, one of the three Halliday’s metafunctions inSystemic-Functional Linguistics. And with the development of Theme theory, many scholarshave advanced patterns of thematic progression, which are regarded as a significant methodfor text analysis and widely applied to the analysis of various genres of texts. However, theyare seldom used in the analysis of legal texts. Therefore, the present study randomly selects20English legal texts and20Chinese legal texts respectively to make a comparative analysisbetween English and Chinese legal texts by adopting both quantitative and qualitativemethods. The aim of the study is to discover the features of English and Chinese legal texts interms of Theme type and TP patterns, similarities and differences between them, and thereasons that lead to the differences.The results of the study indicate that Simple Theme has the highest proportion in bothEnglish and Chinese legal texts. This, to a large extent, is on account of the characteristics oflegal language, namely preciseness, conciseness and solemnity. Nevertheless, as a result ofthe intrinsic differences between languages and cultures, there are far more Simple Themes inChinese than in English while the number of Multiple Theme in English is tremendouslylarger than that of Chinese. As far as the markedness is concerned, both English and Chineselegal texts use far more Unmarked Themes than Marked Themes, which is due to thepreference of declarative clauses in legal texts. As for TP patterns, it has been found thatEnglish and Chinese legal texts almost share the same patterns and the proportions of each TPpattern in these two languages are quite close. At the same time, there still exist slightdivergences in TP distribution between the two languages by reason of different cultures anddifferent ways of thinking. |
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