A Contrastive Analysis Of Theme And Thematic Progression In English And Chinese Poems

Contrastive analysis has been used to explore translation for more than five decades.And recent years have witnessed the transition of focus from sentential level to textual level.In particular, investigations on Chinese and English texts have aroused Chinese scholars’interest.In these studies, Halliday’s thematic theory and Danes’ theory on thematic progression(TP) have been broadly applied to the analysis of various types of texts. The relation betweenTheme and Rheme and patterns of Thematic Progression are important devices in discourseanalysis. Thematic Progression patterns have immediate impacts on text organization,coherence and logic flow of information. According to Systemic Functional Grammar, eachclause of written text in any language can be divided into Theme and Rheme or the Themepart and the Rheme part. In a given linguistic circumstance, the Theme and Rheme of clauseswill produce certain relations, Theme and Theme, Theme and Rheme, Rheme and Rheme,which are variable with the development of text. These relations can be viewed as ThematicProgression and make the whole text coherent.Although abundant and profound studies have been conducted on TP patterns both athome and abroad, concerning applications of TP patterns in news reports, medical texts andadvertisements. It is barely applied in the study of poems. In view of poetry as the mostvaluable and important type of literature, contrastive studies on poetry in English and Chinesecan provide us with a special vision to view the relationship between the two languages.This paper makes a contrastive analysis of English and Chinese poems by combiningqualitative and quantitative method. The aim is to find out the distributions of different typesof theme and Thematic Progression in English and Chinese poems; whether the poems in thetwo languages employ similar TP patterns; and what are differences between the twolanguages. The author selected10English and Chinese poems respectively from the famous poetry. In the qualitative analysis, English and Chinese poems are analyzed respectively. Thequantitative analysis is made by counting the total number of TP patterns used in English andChinese poems and then figuring out the percentage of each TP pattern in English andChinese poems respectively. The following comparison reached such conclusion: the ellipsistheme can be found in both English and Chinese poems, but with higher frequency in Chineseones. More marked themes are employed in English poems than that in Chinese ones. Theclausal themes are rare in Chinese poems compared with English ones. The distribution of TPpatterns in English is relatively dispersive and more types of thematic progression areemployed in English than that in Chinese poems. We can come to a conclusion that thethematic structure of English poems is more complex than the Chinese ones.