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Contrastive Study Of Patterns Of Thematic Progression In English And Chinese Texts

Posted on:2005-06-23Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:X P LiuFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155360125960310Subject:Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
Contrastive analysis has been explored by many scholars for more than five decades, and it greatly facilitates translation and language teaching. Nowadays it is a tendency to do research on the Contrastive analysis on the textual level rather than the sentential level. Particularly investigations on the Contrastive analysis of Chinese and English texts have aroused many Chinese scholars' interest. This paper aims to do a Contrastive analysis on Chinese and English texts based on the framework of thematic progression.Through a study of 94 paragraphs of English texts and 76 paragraphs of Chinese texts in terms of narration, description, exposition and argumentation, we find that the TP with a Constant Theme predominates (with the highest percentage) in both English and Chinese text. Next comes the Simple Linear progression. The Coordinate Thematic progression covers the lowest percentage in the texts in the two languages. However, in English texts, the Combined Thematic progression covers a little higher percentage than that of the Cross Thematic progression. Compared with this, in Chinese texts, the Cross Thematic progression is higher than that of the Combined Thematic progression.The realization of Chinese and English texts is also expounded in this paper. Both of them use lexical and grammatical means to realize cohesions between sentences in the whole text. The difference lies in that English natives prefer repetitions of the same words more than Chinese, while Chinese use a lot of attributes in front of the same words and synonyms rather than the exact repetitions of the same words.
Keywords/Search Tags:Contrastive Analysis, Theme, Thematic Progression, Cohesion
PDF Full Text Request
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