Themes And Thematic Progression Patterns In Michael Crichton' Science Fiction Novels

Since the notion of Theme was first used by Mathesius in 1939, it has attracted many scholars'attention. M.A.K Halliday, the leading figure of London School, later created his own Theme theory and it has been broadly accepted by the public now. On the basis of Theme studies, some linguists have promoted different theories of Thematic Progression (TP). Both linguists abroad and in China have devoted themselves to the studies of TP patterns. Among them, Chinese linguist Huang Yan put forward his 7 TP patterns.The research object here is the language of Michael Crichton's science fiction novels. Crichton is said to be one of the most popular science fiction writers in the world. With enchanting stories and simple language, his works have great influence on science fiction world and are popular all over the world.In this thesis, we select 9 of his representative science fiction novels and take out every first chapter as the research object. In this thesis, we adopt Halliday's Theme theory and Huang Yan's 7TP pattern model as the theoretical tools.In conclusion, we find that Simple Theme is the most used type, occupying 77.5% in general. Only 19.8% are Multiple Themes and 2.7% are Clausal Themes. Furthermore, of all 1002 Simple Themes, there are 86.0% nominal groups, making this category the most typical Simple Theme in selected texts. And among Multiple Themes, the Textual^Topical type, is the most used one, occupying 76.6% of all 256 Multiple Themes. And statistics shows that of all the 1037 Topical Themes, there are 88.1% unmarked Themes and the rest are marked Themes. At last, among all 7 TP patterns, Parallel model is the most typical one, occupying 40.1% of all thematic progression models used.In general, we can see that Crichton tends to use simple language and structure in his novels, making his works easily understood and therefore popular among all kinds of people.