On Thematic Progression Patterns Of English And Chinese Editorials And The Governing Socio-cultural Factors

The editorial, by which editors or publishers of a newspaper express their opinions, is generally regarded as a vital part of a newspaper. As a typical text type, an editorial has its own composing conventions. Viewed from the Systemic Functional Perspective, those composing conventions are determined by the textual metafunction, one of the three metafunctions of language. Thematic progression is an important way to perform the textual metafunction. As thematic progression is a universal linguistic phenomenon, the analysis of it can be applied to texts in different languages. On the basis of the previous relevant studies and under the guidance of the thematic progression patterns postulated by Huang Guowen, the author carries out a contrastive study of the thematic progression patterns of thirty authentic editorials, fifteen in English and fifteen in Chinese, which are selected respectively from two major newspapers, New York Times and People's Daily. It is revealed by the contrastive study of thematic progression that there exist salient similarities of as well as differences between English and Chinese editorials in the adoption of various thematic progression patterns. Based on these findings, the author further makes an attempt to probe from thought pattern and social values into the invisible socio-cultural factors lying behind the visible linguistic phenomena. This research is expected to provide certain enlightenment on language pedagogy, to shed some light on cross-cultural communication, and to enrich the studies in the field of discourse analysis as a supplementary one.