Theme-Rheme Analysis Of Fortress Besieged

As an international influential theory Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) has been widely applied to the study of Chinese in recent years and scholars in China have made some modifications and got many achievements during the application to Chinese. Although his Theme theory has also been discussed, the research on the application of the Theme theory to Mandarin Chinese is still insufficient. Fortress Besieged is one of the classical novels in China, and its language is always the focus of scholars'research. However, in the field of linguistics, there are few papers of text analysis from the perspective of the Theme theory of Halliday. Therefore, the present thesis will make the pioneering commitment to applying Halliday's original Theme theory and the achievements made by Chinese scholars to the analysis of the Chinese text of Fortress Besieged. The aim of the study is to find out the features of its thematic structure of the text, including thematic markedness, types of theme and its thematic pattern, and the characteristics of the unfolding of the story.The thesis selects 9 initial paragraphs from each chapter in Fortress Besieged of Chinese version and analyzes the text from three aspects, thematic markedness, types of theme and its thematic patterns. In the aspect of thematic markedness, the statistic shows that in Fortress Besieged, Qian Zhongshu adopts the unmarked themes for the most of the clauses. Themes can be classified into simple theme and multiple theme according to its complexity. The research shows that the novel uses the simplest thematic structure since its themes are mostly the simple theme. As for the multiple theme, the study indicates that Qian Zhongshu uses lots of textual elements to make the text coherent and little interpersonal elements to pose his own opinion into the story. The sequence of the only multiple theme of textual & interpersonal & experiential is a challenge to Halliday's typical order of the multiple theme. Thematic progression is the relationship and variation of themes and rhemes in clauses. The result illustrates that the parallel and the continuous thematic patterns are the two types used most frequently. For the further step, the study demonstrates that the thematic patterns which the novel adopts are fit for its content and the development of the story.