A Thematic Study On Abstracts Of Theses Applying For Master's Degree Of Management

Theme is an important concept in Systemic Functional Grammar. The theme, defined by Halliday (1994) in An Introduction to Functional Grammar as the point of departure of message and realized in English by the first position in the clause, is considered to play a central role in the construction of texts, particularly in the organization of the message. As an exact and concise summary of the source article, abstract continues to grow in importance. When more and more linguists come to focus on academic articles, abstract, the indispensable part of a research article, should also be paid enough attention.The research questions in this thesis include: 1) types of themes in the abstracts of theses and the proportion of each type; 2) characteristics of each type of themes, subcategory of experiential, discourse theme and interpersonal theme; 3) the complexity of themes, whether it has one, two or even three themes or whether it belongs to clause theme; 4) marked and unmarked themes, 5) the semantic relation between two clauses.The author uses Brown's stratified random sampling strategy in this study to select 50 article abstracts from the total of 150, which are chosen from in the corpus of CNKI (in which corpus theses applying for master's degree in China are reserved in PDF or CAJ form). A detailed analysis of these 50 abstracts of theses applied for master's degree of management is carried out, by applying Halliday's Theme-Rheme theory. A quantitative analysis is performed on the percentage of types of themes, and a qualitative analysis is conducted on the semantic categories in the head of unmarked themes and marked themes (mainly interpersonal and discourse as well as circumstantial theme in experiential themes). The AnnoTool and AntConc are used for theme marking and statistic collection.The results show that: 1) In these abstracts, the experiential themes dominate, and discourse and experiential themes take a large percentage. There are interpersonal themes found, although in a low percentage. 2) Discourse themes also carry certain weight in the statistics. Conjunctions and conjunctive adjuncts share a similar proportion in discourse themes, while continuatives are totally unavailable in the corpus. 3) Simple themes have an absolute advantage compared with multiple themes, and the multiple themes indicate the complexity of the topic discussed by the theses as well as the different ways of authors to organize their thoughts. 4) Experiential themes occupy the highest percentage. The features of two marked themes, i.e. process and circumstance are also analyzed. 5) Within the category of unmarked themes, abstracts are dominated by object of research and epistemic noun with the former displaying distinct features of management and economy topics and the latter of abstract writing. Reference is also very frequent. Yet authors (self) call our attention to the overuse of we by its third largest proportion.Then the author briefly introduces the application of such corpus-based analysis, like we can surely make the English renderings more accurate and fluent by applying our research results to translation. At last, the author lists the limitations of this research, with the hope of solving them in the future.