Analysis Of The Markedness Of Themes In The English Thesis Abstracts

As the exact and concise summary of the source article, abstract continues to draw attentions and studies on it is becoming further. With an overview of the studies of abstracts both at home and abroad, this thesis studies the markedness of themes in thesis English abstracts submitted for doctor's and master's degree in China within the theoretical framework of systematic functional grammar. The corpus for this thesis is selected from CNKI with a random. The 400 thesis abstracts are divided into four disciplines, that is, art, engineering, science and management. After analyzing the materials with the theoretical framework of Halliday's Functional Grammar, the data is collected by the statistical tool, and then the marked themes and unmarked themes are discussed according to the data.Through the analysis of markedness of themes, it is found that there are lots of circumstantial elements used as marked experiential theme. The thesis analyzes the circumstantial elements from the following aspects: extent, location, manner, cause, contingency, accompaniment, role, matter and angle. For the unmarked themes, the thesis analyzes it from the perspective of experiential themes, interpersonal themes and textual themes. For the experiential themes, the thing, notion, people and activity are at the high frequency, and the material process is with the highest frequency in transitivity. The frequency of interpersonal themes in different disciplines is discussed and then the modal adjuncts are discussed. It is showed that in management and art theses the frequencies of interpersonal themes are higher than others. Finally, the thesis analyzes the textual themes from the perspective of conjunctive adjuncts, conjunctions and continuatives.