A Study On Themes And Thematic Progression Patterns In Narratives Of Marine Incident And Accident Reports

With the rapid development of global economic integration, the shipping industries all around the world have been operated prosperously. Nevertheless, at the same time, reports on the traffic accidents at sea are frequently heard. As the Marine Incident and Accident Report (MIAR) keeps an objective and elaborate description on the various traffic accidents happened at sea, it is beneficial for the mariners to learn lessons by reading and studying these cases carefully. In this sense, the recurrence of similar accidents in the future would be greatly reduced. On the other hand, the MIAR, especially its narrative part, has its unique stylistic features from the linguistic perspective. The narrative part records the whole process of event in a comparatively impartial and methodical way, thus, it is of high coherence and logic. In the present thesis, the narrative part of MIAR is extracted as the study object and a research on the characteristics of its themes and thematic progression patterns is carried out in detail.As an essential part of Systemic-Functional Grammar (SFG), the Theme-Rheme theory is first proposed by Mathesius, the founder of Prague School. Soon afterwards, based on the previous studies by Prague School, Halliday puts forward the division of theme and rheme; besides, an elaborate definition and classification of theme are illustrated. All these efforts greatly compensate and perfect the theme-rheme theory. Dane is the first linguist who suggests the concept of thematic progression pattern. He brings the research scope of theme-rheme into a relatively high level-text and comes up with his own models of thematic progression patterns. Combined these two theories with the stylistic features of MIARs, this thesis studies the theme and rheme in the sentence level; besides, seven types of TP patterns are concluded and adopted into the analysis.The combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches is applied in analyzing the collected data. All the material is downloaded from the official website of Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) of UK and then is processed to build a MIARNs texts corpus, from which30samples are randomly selected and analyzed manually. The results indicate that, in the MIARNs texts, the type of theme is mostly unmarked theme and simple theme whereas constant theme pattern and simple linear pattern occur most. All these features are proved to be in a close relation with genre. Finally, this thesis is expected to be helpful in the studies of themes and TP patterns. Besides, it is also expected to complete the study on MIARs, which would be beneficial for the readers to obtain a deeper understanding on MIARs as a special genre.