A Contrastive Analysis Of Thematic Progression Between Chinese And American Brief Tourist Information

This thesis contrasts Chinese and American brief tourist information from the perspective of thematic progression and finds out the similarities and differences between them.Brief tourist information delivers information about tourist attractions to readers and aims to attract more tourists to visit those attractions.Thematic progression,first proposed by Danes in 1974,analyzes the cohesion between clauses in paragraphs and texts.Though contrastive analysis from the perspective of thematic progression pattern has been carried out on texts of many fields,the field of tourist texts is seldom touched.This thesis,adopting the five thematic progressive patterns(simple linear,constant theme,derived theme,split rheme,and spring theme) proposed by Danes,contrasts 60 Chinese and American brief tourist texts collected randomly from Chinese and American tourist websites.The results show that Chinese and American brief tourist information is different in the use of thematic progressive patterns on the whole and they are very similar in the use of simple linear,constant theme,and spring theme patterns but are different in the use of derived theme and split rheme patterns.This conclusion implies that writers of tourist texts should pay more attention to the composing and translation of clauses adopting derived theme pattern and split rheme pattern in the writing and translation of tourist texts.