Themes And Thematic Progression Patterns In Andersen's Fairytales

The theories of Theme and thematic progression are the necessary basic theory foundation. Each clause of any written texts can be divided into Theme and Rheme. Themes and Rhemes in clauses will produce certain relation and variation which is called TP, through which coherence in texts can be realized. So the analysis of thematic structure and TP model in coherent texts is helpful to understand the author's thought quickly and exactly and meanwhile the Theme development of clauses can help construct genre position of the text.Based on such understanding, this thesis selects the 163 initial paragraphs of Andersen's fairytales which belong to fairytale genre. The author tries to analyze these texts with Theme and thematic progression theories.Not only does the whole analysis realize the Theme and TP model of fairly long texts, but also the analytical result show that thematic structure exists in the level of clauses and meanwhile in the levels of paragraphs and even texts. Such analysis is of great benefit to understanding the text's organizing structure and developing way in both macro and micro aspects. The third chapter will realize to analyze single texts through illustrating concrete fairytale examples.The author describes and explains the statistical results of the 163 texts' analysis in chapter 4. The Themes are classified according to Halliday's relative theory, and the classification and statistics of Themes are illustrated through tables. The statistical result indicates that Andersen's fairytales use simple Themes a lot. And the further division result states clearly that the simple Themes consisting of only one nominal group account for close to 75%, this percentage is considerable. Multiple Themes are counted according to Halliday's order standard, that is "Textual Theme ^ interpersonal Theme ^ ideational Theme". The fairytale author uses a lot of textual Themes so that it obviously guarantees coherence of every text. Clausal Themes are added up according to the relationship of parataxis and hypotaxis, the statistics shows that clausal Themes of parataxis are fairly many. Such results can conclude that unmarked Theme must be much more than marked Themes, and statistical result proves this point. The analysis shows that Andersen's fairytales apply the simplest structures in each classification. This point further proves the language characteristics of children literature. The last step of analytical statistics counts TP models of fairytales. Andersen's fairytales mainly adopt both parallel and progressive models that occupy near 80%. The thesis deeply analyzes and narrates these phenomena.