| Sports play an important role in modern society, and sports news has become an important part in comprehensive English newspapers. The present thesis aims at discussing the features of thematic structure and thematic progression in sports news discourse in English newspapers through analyzing some news items from three major English newspapers, namely The Times, The New York Times, and The Chicago Sun-times.According to Halliday, thematic structure is one of the structural features in the textual resources. The terms of Theme and Rheme can be traced back to Plato, but the concept of thematic structure in modern linguistics is first proposed by Mathesius, one of the co-founders of Prague School. Halliday retains the terms, but gives them new definitions and theoretical interpretation. After revision and development, Theme has dissociated from Topic and Given and evolved into an independent concept. Themes can be classified as marked Themes or unmarked Themes according to the probabilities of certain elements acting as Themes. Among marked Themes, different elements may differ in markedness.Within Systemic Functional linguists, there are certain controversies and arguments around Theme. The greatest dispute is probably the existential there; and linguists also disagree on such issues as the so-called "thematic comment", thematic structure in clause complex, etc.Halliday's theory on Theme seems to limit itself within the clausal level, or at most only one step up—clause complex. More contributions on the study of thematic structure at the multi-sentential level are made by F. Danes and P. H. Fries. Danes proposes the concept of "thematic progression" and several patterns. Fries makes further research on the possible relation between the thematic progression patterns and genres of texts. Many Chinese scholars pay attention to the role played by thematic progression in textual construction and contribute their thoughts to this aspect.Due to the quantitative and statistical method of the present study, the present author is obliged to make his choice on the controversial issues in order to ensure the integrity of the statistics. For example, in the existential there clause, there alone is taken as the Theme; an analysis model of four groups and seven patterns is used in studying the thematic progression in the corpus.Both at home and abroad, the trends in the studies on journalistic English and one of its varieties—sports news in English newspapers show that a full and complete description and analysis on the news texts themselves is necessary, and the description and analysis should be incorporated with the cognitive and socio-cultural context of the news. The present thesis is an effort towards the former requirement.The present study mainly has the following findings:1) T-R structure analysis can quite effectively describe the sports news discourse in newspapers. Even with a concise model such as the one in the present study, most clauses can be covered and included into the scope of study. 2) When the two sub-varieties are compared. Columns seem to be freer or less formal in style than News, since the former more frequently employ minor clauses, elliptical clauses, andβclauses (both preceding and following), and less frequently use nominalizations in Themes. 3) The majority of Themes employed in sports news are simple Themes; within multiple Themes, textual Themes appears much more frequently than interpersonal Themes, and interpersonal Themes seem to play a peripheral role. The case is even clearer with the sub-variety of News, which rarely employ interpersonal Themes. 4) Quantitatively speaking, the proportion between marked Themes and unmarked Themes in English sports news in press is about 1:5.5) On the intensity scale of markedness, Compliment as Theme holds a much higher mark than Adjunct as Theme does—at least it is the case for English sports news discourse. 6) Thematising structures, such as Predicated Theme and Thematic Equatives. are shown to be marginal tools in the English sports news in press. 7) Among different experiential contents, People and Abstraction frequently appears in Themes, while Time expressions and Concrete things are shown to be peripheral. 8) Among seven TP patterns in the present model, Constant Theme Pattern, Spring Pattern, and Simple Linear Pattern are shown to be frequently used in sports news, while the other four patterns, especially the hierarchical ones, are much less frequently used. Certain degree of disparity exists between the two sub-varieties concerned, but the correlation between varieties and TP patterns can be described as obscure and complex. Based on the above findings, such a conclusion can be made: T-R structure and TP patterns can act as useful tools in describing sports news texts; in the sports news texts, certain elements are more favored or appear more frequently in Theme position than other elements; when examined at a multi-sentential level, some patterns tend to appear more frequently than other patterns. These preferences and tendencies are supposed to be inherent features of sports news discourse in newspapers, and to be facilitating to achieve the communicative effects of news.The present thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one introduces what the thesis is about. Chapter two reviews theories and previous studies on T-R structure and TP and studies on sports news discourse in English newspapers. Chapter three maps out a framework of statistical analysis on the elements concerned. Chapter four discusses in detail the statistical results and compares them with similar previous research. Chapter five concludes the present study, reflects on its limitations and provides some suggestions for further study.
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