A Contrastive Study Of Themes In English News Titles From The Perspective Of Systemic Functional Linguistics

Located in the beginning of news,the news title reflecting the key point of the entire news is important.Modern readers tend to scan news titles in order to obtain the main information or decide whether to read the entire news or not.Researchers have studied news title from different perspectives.Nevertheless,few of them do research from the Thematic aspect in Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL hereafter).Adopting Theme Theory in SFL,the thesis studies Theme in English news titles with the quantitative and qualitative methods to describe similarities and differences between English news titles of two events in the latter half of the year 2016,G20 Summit and Rio Summer Olympics,extracted from China Daily and The Guardians.By comparing Themes in the two newspapers,the thesis reveals that similarities lie in the following aspects.First,Multiple Themes and Unmarked Themes are more frequently used than Simple Themes and Marked Themes.Most of Multiple Themes are combinations of Interpersonal Theme and Topical Theme.Second,Topical Theme and Interpersonal Theme are more abundantly adopted than Textual Theme.Resorting to contrasting Themes in the two newspapers,this thesis shows that differences exist in the following points.Firstly,Multiple Themes and Unmarked Themes have higher frequency in The Guardians than in China Daily.Secondly,Topical Theme,Interpersonal Theme and Textual Theme take up larger proportion in The Guardians than in China Daily.After analyzing all samples,the thesis draws two significant conclusions.On the one hand,the writer of both China Daily and The Guardians are likely to adopt Multiple Theme(the combination of Interpersonal Theme and Topical Theme)and Unmarked Theme when writing English news title.On the other hand,the writer of The Guardians tends to use Multiple Theme,Interpersonal Theme and Topical Theme;while the writer of China Daily tends to apply Material Process and Finite Verbal Operator.In conclusion,in order to make English news title more native,news writer should use more Multiple Theme(the combination of Interpersonal Theme and Topical Theme)and Unmarked Theme as well as the Combination of Conjunctive Adjunct and Participant elements,because all writers of The Guardians are native English speakers while most writers of China Daily are Chinese.This thesis provides a new perspective for researchers to further study English news title and offers an application of SFL.However,due to the limitation of the source of English news titles,the thesis fails to cover every type of Theme.Therefore,the future researchers should pay more attention to expending the types of Theme and to enriching the source of data.