Thematic Choice In Research Article Abstracts: A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese

The Theme is an important concept in Systemic Functional Grammar. The Theme, defined by Halliday (1994) in An Introduction to Functional Grammar as the point of departure of message and realized in English by the first position in the clause, is considered to play a central role in the construction of texts, particularly in the organization of the message. Abstract is an indispensable part of a research article, and therefore it should be paid enough attention to.The research questions in this thesis include: 1) What is the characteristic of different types of themes in English and Chinese research article abstracts? Are there any significant differences in the number of types of themes between English and Chinese? If there are, then why and in what aspects do the differences exist? 2) What is the characteristic of the textual theme in English and Chinese research article abstracts? Is there a significant difference in the textual theme between English and Chinese research article abstracts? 3) What is the marked theme mainly realized by in English and Chinese research article abstracts? Is there a significant difference between them? 4) Which semantic category mainly falls into the position of the unmarked theme in both English and Chinese research article abstracts? Is there a significant difference between their using?The Brown's stratified random sampling strategy was applied in this study to select 90 article abstracts from the total of 274, which were chosen from six prestigious and representative journals in the field of Linguistics both in English and Chinese. These journals include: Applied Linguistics, Journal of Pragmatics, System, Foreign Language Teaching and Research, Modern Foreign Languages and Journal of Foreign Languages. A detailed analysis of these 90 research article abstracts was carried out, by applying Halliday's Theme-Rheme theory. A quantitative analysis was performed on the percentage of types of themes, and a qualitative analysis was conducted on the semantic categories in the head of unmarked themes and circumstantially marked themes. T-tests of significance were performed to thosecategories, through the software of SPSS.The results show that: 1) both English and Chinese research article abstracts were dominated by simple (topical) themes, which accounted for 61.6% and 81.7% respectively;however, there is no significant difference in the simple themes between two languages. The percentage of multiple themes (textual theme + topical theme) in English was higher than that in Chinese, and there is a significant difference in the multiple themes between English and Chinese. The significance is as high as .000. The interpersonal themes were found in English research article abstracts, although with a low proportion (0.6%);however, no interpersonal themes were found in Chinese research article abstracts. 2) With respect to the textual themes, the Chinese research article abstracts were dominated by conjunctive adjuncts (59.4%), whereas English ones were dominated by conjunctions and relatives (82.9%). However, there is no significant difference in the subcategories of the textual themes between English and Chinese;3) As for the markedness, the unmarked themes dominated in both English and Chinese research article abstracts. With regard to the marked themes, the circumstantially marked themes were mainly realized by 'Place' in both English and Chinese research article abstracts. There is no significant difference in the number of marked themes between English and Chinese research article abstracts. 4) The unmarked theme of 'Epistemic noun' and 'Object of research' dominated in both English and Chinese research article abstracts. Moreover, there is a significant difference in the unmarked themes between English and Chinese abstracts, with a significance of .003.The results of the current study can be applied to translation. During translation, themes of the original language may not always find their equivalents in the target language. Themes of the target language may, according to the specific context, coincide with or deviate from those in the original. Furthermore, the results of this study can also be applied to language teaching, especially to the teaching of writing, helping students compose a normative and idiomatic abstract.