An Analysis Of Thematic Development Patterns In English Advertisements Of The Straight-line Type

With the development of economy, advertisement plays a more and more important role in modern society and permeates every aspect of social life. Its purpose is to inspire people's imagination, to stimulate their emotion, and to persuade customers purchase certain commodity successfully. With the globalization of the world economy, more and more companies abroad are selling or attempt to sell their products to our country and more and more products in our country are sold to foreign countries. Thus, English advertisements play an important role in their plans to promote the sales. Researches on English advertisements are becoming increasingly useful and important. Theme---Rheme structure and Thematic development patterns are very important devices in text analysis, The employment of the thematic structure can provide a lot of insights in exploring how texts are constructed. And through the analysis of the Thematic Development pattern, we can know how the coherence of the text is realized. The paper tries to explore the theme and thematic development patterns in English advertisements of the straight-line type.And in this paper the author intends to make clear the following two questions: (1) what are the features of the distribution of different types of themes in English advertisements? (2) Are there any thematic development patterns highly used in the English advertisements of the straight-line type? If any, what and why?Some commercial English advertisements of straight-line type were gathered from resources including Newsweek, Newspapers such as 21th Century and China Daily and published books such as《English Advertising》and《Theory and Practice of Discourse Analysis: A Study in Advertising Discourse》as well as the Internet, which were then analyzed by the author using the theory of the thematic structure and thematic development pattern as an analytical tool and a theoretical support.The paper contains seven chapters. There are six chapters in this paper altogether. Chapter One is the introduction in which what, why, how of the study is illustrated; the organization of the paper is introduced as well. Chapter Two is the literature review about thematic structure, thematic development patterns as well as the previous study on the advertising texts. Chapter three provides a theory of thematic structure and thematic development patterns, in which the definition and classification of the theme are given and the concept of thematic development and different scholars'opinions about the thematic development patterns are also expounded. In Chapter Four it mainly gives a simple illustration about the English advertising. There are four parts in this chapter namely the concept of advertising, the classification of advertising, the elements of print advertising as well as different types of body texts. In Chapter Five the author analyzes an advertisement in terms of Simple Theme, Clausal Theme, Multiple Theme, Ellipsis Theme, and the features of their distribution; in addition, she analyzes the different functional themes and the distributional features. In Chapter Six, the detailed analysis of the thematic development patterns in six English advertisements of straight-line type are given separately. Then the occurring frequency of each thematic development pattern in English advertisements of straight-line type advertisements and the data analysis are listed in the following sections. Chapter Seven is the conclusion; the major findings, limitation as well as the significance of the thesis are presented in this chapter.