Thematic Progression Patterns In English And Chinese Economic News Reports

Recent years have witnessed the transition of focus from sentential level to textual level in the field of contrastive analysis. As an effective approach to discourse analysis, Thematic Progression (TP) has been widely applied to contrastive analysis of texts in different languages.The notion of TP was first proposed by Danes (1974) and he also outlined three fundamental types of TP. On the basis of research by Danes and other scholars both at home and abroad, the author summarizes the nine TP patterns utilized for analysis in this thesis, i.e. TP with a Constant Theme, Simple Linear Progression pattern, TP with a Constant Rheme, Cross Progression pattern, Combined Progression pattern, TP with Derived Theme, TP with Split Rheme, Coordinate Progression pattern and Irregular Progression pattern.The data for this analysis is composed of 30 English and 30 Chinese economic news reports randomly collected from The Financial Times and The People's Daily respectively. By analyzing the data, the author aims to answer the three questions: 1) Which TP patterns are found in English and Chinese economic news texts and what is their respective frequency? 2) What are the similarities and differences between the two languages in terms of TP distribution? 3) What are the possible reasons for the similarities and differences in TP distribution between two languages?Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data, the author has found out the existence of all nine TP patterns in both languages and the similarities and differences in TP distribution. Besides, the author also makes an investigation into the possible reasons for these similarities and differences from the perspective of cohesion, genre, linguistic typology, syntax, way of thinking and so on.In spite of the limitations in this study, the findings of this thesis can reflect the employment of TP patterns in English and Chinese economic news reports to certain extent, which hopefully will be beneficial to the contrastive study of English and Chinese journalistic style writing and translation.