A Contrastive Analysis Of Thematic Progression Patterns In English And Chinese Annual Reports Of Listed Companies

This thesis presents a contrastive analysis of various thematic progression patterns which organize the information in a bilingual corpus of chairman's statements to shareholders in annual reports of listed companies (in Chinese and English) covering different business lines. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the socio-cultural factors which may account for the differences in the choice of the thematic progression (TP), thus finding out the respectively preferred patterns of these two languages within the same kind of genre and shedding new light on the genre analysis and ESP (English for special purpose) business writing.In the first place, a corpus of 10 Chinese chairman's statements to shareholders in annual reports of listed companies (CCSS) and 10 English ones chosen from the Internet is collected to conduct a contrastive analysis of various thematic progression patterns. This analysis, within the theoretical frameworks of seven TP patterns, i.e., the Parallel, the Continuous, the Concentrated, the Alternative, the Coordinate, the Derivative and the Irregular from Huang and seven semantic relations from Xu, shows that the Irregular TP pattern is most frequently chosen in Chinese chairman's statements to shareholders in annual reports of listed companies while the Parallel TP pattern is preferred in English ones. The thesis then explores the influence of several factors which may account for these differences in the choice of thematic progression patterns based on the Genre Theory: the communicative purpose,the cultural factors and the social factors. The results indicate that the differences in the choice of TP patterns are due to the influence of the different cultural factors in terms of context and power distance, the different social roles the text producers and receivers play and the social distance between them.The results of this analysis also indicate that, even within the same genre, the choice of thematic progression patterns varies from language to language because of the differences in social-cultural factors, which is of significance for the genre analysis. At the same time, the results arouse the cross-cultural awareness of the ESP practitioners. This is very crucial for ESP practitioners to compose the English annual reports in a more native manner.