On Coherence Of Political News Reports From Perspectives Of Theme Choice And Thematic Progression Patterns

As one of the devices for text analysis, Theme and thematic progression is of crucial importance for the building and development of every aspect of semantic coherence. By dividing Theme and Rheme in a text, the interrelations between sentences and the rules for information distribution will be revealed. The application of thematic progression patterns to specific text analysis can guide text translation and teaching. But it is seldom used to the coherence study of political news reports. This thesis attempts to apply this theory to the coherence study of political news reports, aiming to examine how, Theme and thematic progression pattern, as implicit structural cohesive devices, contribute and build the text coherence.This thesis first elaborates on the purpose and the significance of this research, introduces some influential research on Theme, thematic progression, coherence and news reports at home and abroad. Then it provides the definition and classification of Theme and thematic progression patterns. Having learned and comprehended the different ways of Theme and thematic progression patterns classification created by domestic and foreign scholars, the author of this research presents her own point of view. This thesis is both qualitative and quantitative. Statistical analysis has been carried out to the analysis of Theme and thematic progression patterns in 10 political news report texts. Qualitative study is used to examine how the two interact to contribute to text coherence.After a great deal of examples and analysis, the results of this research are as follows: Among the three sub-types of Theme simple Theme covers 73%, next are the multiple theme (23%) and clausal theme (4%). Simple Theme contributes to the semantic coherence by topic relevance. Multiple Theme manifests inter-sentential logic-semantic relations in a text. Textual Theme, functioning as explicit cohesive ties is of great importance in syntactic coherence. Experiential Theme contributes to the semantic coherence of the text by topic relevance. Interpersonal Theme contributes mainly to the mood coherence of the text. Clausal Theme brings the Theme and information into the picture alongside the inter-sentential resources of cohesion to propel the text coherence. The main thematic progression patterns occurred in the 10 English political news discourses are: the constant Theme pattern, the non-regular Theme pattern, the concentrated Theme pattern and the continuous Theme pattern. These thematic progression patterns mainly benefit registeral coherence and help writers eliminate illogical and disordered thread of thought. Hopefully, this research will help the language learners to better understand the news discourses and be conducive to news discourse writing and translation.