| The aim of this study is to compare/contrast advertising text written in both English and Chinese in terms of Theme and Rheme structure. The motivation for using the Theme/Rheme structure to analyze advertising texts in the two languages is two-fold. First of all, while there exists a multitude of comparative studies between the two languages, very little analysis has been carried out in the comparison of advertising texts between the two languages. Secondly, thematic considerations allow the analyst to highlight areas of textual organization in a systematic way for purposes of comparison.Fries first proposes that there is some interrelation between theme and genre, and puts forward three hypothesis. Based on Fries' hypotheses and the fact that this is a contrastive study, the hypotheses of this thesis are as follows: Are there similarities between the Chinese and English advertisement texts corpora with regard to Theme/Rheme choices and thematic patterning?This thesis compares and contrasts English and Chinese advertisement texts in terms of theme from three perspectives, that is, the three Metafunctions (Ideational, interpersonal, and textual metafunction) proposed by Halliday. Through the analysis, it shows overall similarity between English and Chinese advertisement in its choice of theme and TP patterns, barring certain grammatical constraints. This proves there is close interrelationship between thematic choice and choice of TP patterns and genre, and thus testifies the hypothesis of Fries.The corpus for this study consists of 60 texts: 30 from three kinds of advertising in English, and 30 from three corresponding kinds of advertising in Chinese. In order to guarantee the validity of this comparative study, the Chinese and English texts chosen in this study are of the same or similar topic.
|
PDF Full Text Request