| Internationally, English abstracts have become the main channel for distributing and promoting new knowledge within the academic community. Domestically, an English abstract has become an indispensable part of theses: for Chinese students, no matter what their majors are, when writing theses, besides a Chinese abstract, they have to write an abstract in English. Its significance is self-evident.As a typical text type, English abstract has its own composing conventions, which are determined by the textual metafunction, one of the three metafunctions of language, viewed from the systemic functional perspective. Textual metafunction refers to the way in which people organize information when using languages, and meanwhile it indicates the relations between one message and another one. Thematic progression is an important way to perform the textual metafunction. Just as Huang Guowen said in 1998,"Thematic progression is one of the most important theories of discourse coherence, and it is one of the effective ways for exploring the structure of an article."In other words, the proper use of thematic progression pattern, to some degree, determines the quality of an abstract.Therefore, based on Xu Shenghuan's proposal of seven logical semantic relations and Huang Guowen's six-TP model, this paper carries out a comparative study on thematic progression patterns of sixty thesis abstracts in English written by three groups of students, of which twenty samples are written by native students of English majoring in Linguistics, twenty samples are written by Chinese students majoring in FLAL (i.e., Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics), and another twenty samples by Chinese students majoring in CLP (i.e., Chinese Linguistics and Philosophy), which are selected randomly from two online databases, PQDD (ProQuest Digital Dissertations) and CMFD (China Master's Theses Full-Text Databases), in order to answer the following three research questions:1) What are the preferred TP patterns in each group?2) What are the similarities and differences between them in terms of the TP patterns chosen?3) What are the possible influencing factors which may account for the similarities and differences?The analysis shows that the Concentrated progression is most frequently employed in Group One, while the Parallel progression is preferred in Group Two and Group Three. The results also indicate that the overall tendency of choosing TP patterns of the three groups is the same. Therefore, conclusions are drawn as follows: in terms of TP pattern selection there is no significant difference between the three groups without taking other aspects into considerations, such as grammar, vocabulary and so on. In other words, the English proficiency has little influence on Chinese students'choice of TP patterns when it comes to English abstracts writing. The English abstracts written by Chinese students majoring in English is no better than those written by the students majoring in Chinese in terms of the employment of TP patterns. Then, based on these findings, this paper further probes into the possible influencing factors covering the communicative purpose and the characteristics of TP patterns per se which may account for the similarities.In spite of the limitations existing in the research, it is significant both theoretically and practically. In theory, it will enrich the study of discourse analysis in terms of TP patterns. In practice, it may shed some light on English abstract teaching and writing. |
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