On The Relevance Between Patterns Of Thematic Progression And Textual Coherence

Speaking has close relationship with society and human life. It has shed itsmatchless light and charm in the history of human civilization progress. WithChina’s entering the World Trade Organization and successfully holding the Beijing2008Olympic Games and the World Expo2010Shanghai, English is becomingincreasingly important in Chinese people’s daily life. Quite a few English learnersbecome keen on participating in various English contests in order to improve theirEnglish competence.“CCTV Cup” English Speaking Contest, jointly held by ChinaCentral Television and Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, isundoubtedly the most influential and prestigious one with the highest level in China.In this research, the author aims to explore the relevance between ThematicProgression (TP) patterns and textual coherence based on the corpus drawn fromself-built mini-database of English prepared speeches chosen from2006-2008“CCTV Cup” English Speaking Contest.Research findings reveal that:1) there are eight types of TP patterns occurringin the corpus of the database. The Irregular pattern is the most frequently usedpattern accounting for38.4%, ranking before the Constant Theme pattern with19.5%. The Continuous pattern ranks the third taking up16.6%, followed up by theConstant Rheme pattern with14.5%. The four preferred TP patterns altogetherconstitute89%of the total. All the rest five TP patterns occupy merely11%, arelatively small proportion. In particular, the Coordinate pattern is an exception in all samples since there is no occurrence of it.2) The adoption of eight types of TPpatterns plays an important role in the coherence of English speeches.3) Severalfactors influence speakers’ adoption of TP patters, such as culture, thinking pattern,etc.Above all, adopting different types of TP patterns can not only promote thesemantic coherence in the speech, but show the substance of the speech as well.