On The English Version Of Report On The Work Of The Government Of 2009

The concepts of Theme and Rheme were put forward by the Prague School and applied in the Communication Dynamics theory. Then, the Systemic Functional Grammar (Hereinafter referred to as SFG) School, with Halliday as the representative, further studied and developed the concepts. As a result, Thematic Structure theory became one of the most important methods for analyzing texts. Based on FG, in 1974, Danes proposed the concept of Thematic Progression and published some main patterns of thematic progression, which lighted the fire of studying the thematic structure and thematic progression of texts internationally. The studies covered advertising texts, medical texts, news reports texts etc. However, few of them adopted these theories to analyze political texts. Thus, this study chooses the English version of Report on the Work of Government (Hence, E-RWG hereinafter) as the research subject so as to supplement the current studies on thematic structure and thematic progression.The overall research method adopted in this thesis is both quantitative and qualitative. The English version of report on the work of the government is analyzed from several aspects, such as, the types of themes, the distribution of different types of themes, the patterns of thematic progression in it and their distribution etc. The research questions are as follows:what are the distinctive features of thematic structure in 2009 English version of report on the work of the government? What kind of theme and thematic patterns plays the dominant role in English version of report on the work of the government? What textual functions can they play? How can the dominant type of thematic structure or thematic progression pattern help organize the text in order to make it easier for the readers to comprehend?The sample of this study is the 2009 English version of report on the work of the government. The Chinese version was delivered by Premier Wen Jiabao at the Second Session of the Eleventh National People's Congress on March 5,2009. The English version was translated by special central government agency, which includes 167 paragraphs and 649 clauses in total. This study covers all the clauses in the sample text so as to make the research scientific and reasonable, and its conclusions justified and reliable. After careful research and analysis, we have found that:as to the thematic structures, the Simple Theme takes up a large proportion. This is contributed to the objective and rigorous style of political texts. Besides, there is an extensive application of the personal pronoun "We" to the beginning of the clauses, leading to the increase of simple theme. Multiple themes also have a decisive position in the political texts. However, clausal theme and predicated theme are rare in the sample text.As to the TP patterns, if analyzed by basic patterns, the Constant Theme pattern accounts for the largest percentage, with Constant Rheme pattern as the second important one. But if it is analyzed strictly by different TP patterns, the combined pattern----onstant Theme+Derived Rheme----akes up the largest proportion, while the above mentioned basic patterns such as Constant Theme and Constant Rheme etc are relatively small in number. This depends on the rigorous language style of political texts, which means the strict General-branch structure. By comprehending the characteristics of the TP patterns, the foreign readers of RWG can understand the texts with better order and logic.The result of this research has further confirmed the viewpoints of Fries etc, who thinks that the pattern of thematic progression of a text is closely related to its genre. Thus, this study supplements the previous studies on thematic structure and thematic progression to some extent. Besides, the analytical method adopted in this thesis can be referred to while analyzing thematic structure and TP of other types of texts. The result of this research can hopefully be employed in the teaching and translation of political texts. And it is expected to be helpful for foreign readers to understand RWG profoundly and accurately.