A Contrastive Analysis Of The Choice Of Thematic Progression Patterns In Chinese Quarterly Reports And English Quarterly Reports

This paper presents a contrastive study of the varying thematic progression patterns which organize information in a bilingual corpus of Quarterly reports (in Chinese and in English) covering different business lines with a view to exploring the socio-cultural factors which may account for the differences in the choice of TP patterns between Chinese quarterly reports and English quarterly reports, thus shedding new light on the genre analysis and ESP business writing. In the first place, a corpus of 20 Chinese quarterly reports and 20 English quarterly reports chosen from the websites of various corporations at home and abroad is collected to conduct a contrastive analysis of TP patterns. This analysis, within the theoretical framework of seven TP patterns, i.e. the Parallel, the Continuous, the Concentrated, the Alternative, the Coordinate, the Derivative and the Irregular from Huang and seven semantic relations from Xu, shows that the Irregular TP pattern is most frequently chosen in Chinese quarterly reports while the Parallel TP pattern is preferred in English quarterly reports. The paper then explores the influence of several factors which may account for these differences in the choice of TP patterns based on the Genre Theory: the communicative purpose, the cultural factors and the social factors. The results indicate that the difference in the choice of TP patterns in Chinese quartelry reports and English quarterly reports are due to the influence of the different cultural factors in terms of context and power distance, the different social roles the text producers and receivers play and the social distance between them. The results of this analysis indicate that even within the same genre, the choice of TP patterns varies from language to language because of the difference in socio-cultural factors, which is of significance for the genre analysis. At the same time, the results arouse the cross-culture awareness of ESP practitioners. This is very crucial for ESP practitioners to compose the English quarterly reports in a more native manner.