A Contrastive Analysis Of Thematic Structure Of English And Chinese Academic Prose

The theory of Theme-Rheme structure in systemic-functional linguistics developed from the Prague School approach, and several modifications have been witnessed. The thesis is to apply British linguistic M. A. K. Halliday's thematic theory and Danes' patterns of thematic progression to English and Chinese academic prose texts, with the aim to expose their respective text organization patterns and text cohesive devices and how important genre and language in deciding the formation of thematic structure. To achieve this goal, a literature review of the development of the thematic structure, Halliday's thematic structure theory and Danes' thematic progression will be provided. After that, the similarities and dissimilarities in constituents as themes, the typical roles of theme, types of theme, themes overlapping process participants in transitivity system and patterns of thematic progression will be analyzed. Through careful comparative analysis of the thematic structure in the two language sample texts, it can be concluded that both languages share a lot in common since they belong to the same genre, meanwhile possessing some features different from one another since they are distinct languages. Therefore the thematic structure is more genre-related than language-related for the reason that both languages are very important variable in determining what the text is about and both languages prefer the same dominant patterns of thematic progression. Anyway, the thematic structure will tell us more if more exploration in rheme is done. Last but not least, the thesis mentions that the application of thematic structure to teaching English as a foreign language on text level is a meaningful tentative way.