| The present thesis aims to investigate the realization of ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings of marked Theme in the discourse of news reporting within the theoretical framework of systemic functional grammar. Language, from the systemic functional point of view, is interpreted as a network of relations, are organized around two main kinds of meanings: the ideational meaning and interpersonal meaning with textual meaning combined (Halliday, 1994). News reporting including news from journals or newspaper and broadcast news(in this thesis, conveniently, journal or newspaper news reporting is called news report; broadcast news reporting is called broadcast news report), as a special means of medium, have rich repertoire of ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning resources of marked Themes.The main function of this genre is to reflect the reality of the world, with the fundamental component of ideational meaning attached. In the present thesis, an attempt is made to analyze the three kinds of meanings of marked Theme by the choices of particularly linguistic forms. The marked ideational meaning is realized by circumstantial adjuncts, nominal phrases, verbs, preposed Theme. The interpersonal meaning, when we use language to interact with other people, enables people to establish and maintain relations with others, to influence their behavior, to express our own viewpoint on things in the world, to elicit or change theirs (Halliday, 1994). The main function of the interpersonal meaning in news reporting is to encode the writer's attitude to the reality, through which interpersonal meaning is realized. The analysis of the interpersonal meaning of marked Theme is based on the perspective of vocabulary choice such as the frequent choices of comment adjuncts and mood adjuncts.Textual meaning is closely relevant to ideational meaning and interpersonal meaning. In this thesis, the textual meaning of marked Theme is investigated in terms of cohesion and coherence, for example, how the coherent effect can be achieved by some superficially linguistic connections such as conjunctions, conjunctive adjuncts and some typical discourse markers; in what way the coherence of news reporting is achieved by the underlying functional connectedness.Through the analysis of marked Theme, a number of major findings are achieved.Theoretically, this thesis extends the field of systemic functional grammar in terms of discourse analysis. Practically some illumination can also be achieved: firstly, the appropriate use of marked Theme can facilitate the interpretation and understanding of the nature of discourse from the functional point of view. Secondly, it suggests the argument that marked Theme, for language user, contributes to the realization of ideational, interpersonal meaning and textual meaning in terms of lexis and grammatical means, with the help of which we can successful convey information. Thirdly, it provides an insight into the characterization of cohesion and coherence in discourse. Fourthly, the frequency of marked Theme correlates significantly with genres. Since the news from journals or newspaper or broadcast news unfolds the different frequency of marked Theme, the conclusion is that textual marked Themes occur in higher frequencies from journals or newspaper than from broadcast news. While circumstantial marked Theme is comparatively lower in the former than in the latter.Apart from the introduction which is about the main concern and the rationale of the present study, the thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1 reviews the previous studies on thematic resources. Chapter2 explains Systemic-Functional Grammar and three meanings and their linguistic means in detail. Chapter 3 is the detailed analysis of the 30 news reports and the discussion of the results of the analysis. Chapter 4 analyzes the distribution of three kinds of marked Themes and their relations with genre. Then the last part concludes the whole thesis, and discusses the limitations of the present thesis, and makes some suggestions for further studies.
|
PDF Full Text Request