Organizational Patterns Of English And Chinese Texts For Business And Economics: A Contrastive Study

This thesis contrastively studies, mainly based on the theoretic framework of "topic analysis" by van Dijk and "thematic progression" by some others, the underlying arrangement patterns of topics of English and Chinese texts. The overall objective is to examine the discourse patterns of representative sample of English and Chinese articles selected from the English magazine The Economist and its Chinese near counterpart. 《经济世界》, and decide whether they indicate specific differences which can be attributed to linguistic and cultural environments and also modes of thinking.In order to guarantee the feasibility of the research, a pilot study is carried out in the first part of the actual analysis. There is no denial that the application of Thematic Progression model to text description has enjoyed a good reputation for a long time in the history of text-linguistics. Nevertheless, owing to the confusing classification of Thematic Progression patterns whether in English or Chinese language, this descriptive method has been thrown into controversy since its birth.Central to the theoretic framework is the "topic analysis" advanced by van Dijk (1983), Stubbs (1983) and Clyne (1987). Van Dijk proposes to assign topics to the global macro-level of discourse description and suggests a thematic/topic analysis against the background of a theory of semantic macro-structure. Macro-structures are organized sets of propositions, which can be defined as "the smallest independent meaning constructs of language and thought". According to him, propositions, which are part of macro-structures, are called macro-propositions; each topic of a text can be represented as such a macro-propositions, and some of the topics are more general than others. So the entire macro-structure of a text displays a hierarchical organization of macro-propositions. Their dependency relationships can be represented by means of a tree-diagram which demonstrates the texts underlying organizational pattern. If the tree-diagram exhibits a more linear or less parallel manner, the macro-proposition developing organizational pattern can be considered as subordinated; if the diagram demonstrates a less linear or more parallel fashion, with each macro-proposition having its own branching propositions, then thepattern can be considered coordinated. These definitions also allow for the possibility that a text can show coordinated and subordinated patterns at the same time.The total text corpus consists of 28 articles, fourteen selected from each language based on the specific criteria set forth. The steps of the actual analysis of the texts are as follows: first, to determine each text's prepositional structure and mark all topic-shifts according to the pre-set criteria; then summarize the contents of each subtopic addressed in between the topic-shifts in the form short captions; finally, to draw up the outlines of all texts and transpose them into tree-diagram, which reveal the texts' hierarchical structures representing dependency relationships between topics/subtopics. After that, two statistical tests are applied to analyze the discourse patterns of the English and Chinese articles, thus determining the validity of the hypothesis of the study that the Chinese texts display a different organizational pattern from the English texts.The two statistical tests (i.e.,Wilcoxon signed-ranks test and Mann-Whitney U-Test). applied to the data, have concurred with each other and led to the following findings: there is conclusive evidence that the English texts display a more subordinated and less coordinated organizational pattern than the Chinese texts, and vice visa. So. it can be confirmed that the Chinese texts show a higher degree of coordination than the English texts.Also a representation of the data in percentage figures has provided us with the picture: 50% of Chinese texts vs. 29% of English texts are mainly coordinated, while 50% of English texts vs. 28% of Chinese texts are mainly subordinated. Here the imbalance of percentages within the...