| With the rapid development of movie industry, multifarious movies have sprung up oneafter another. Movie reviews as a pivotal part of movie industry, play a key role not only inintroducing and commenting movies but also attracting the attentions of more and moremovie goers and consumers. Many scholars have dedicated to the studies of movie reviews indifferent veins. However, factually, most researches are accustomed to focusing on thepractical value of movie reviews, not drawing enough attention to the linguistic value of thisspecial genre. Besides, the previous linguistic analysis of movie reviews are confined to thefields, like code-switching, translation, appraisal resources and so on. Few studies have beencarried out to analyze how a movie review is organized from the perspective of discoursestructure.Therefore, this thesis, based on Halliday s (1985) theme-rheme theory and Danes (1974)theory of thematic progression, aims to make a contrastive analysis about the choice of themetypes and thematic progression patterns between English and Chinese movie reviews.On the basis of previous studies on thematic progression patterns, the present studyadopts six types of thematic progression as the model of analysis, that is, the same themepattern, the same rheme pattern, the continuous pattern, the alternative pattern, the irregularpattern and the T1+R1-T2pattern.40pieces of Chinese movie reviews and40pieces ofEnglish movie reviews from the popular newspapers and magazines are randomly selected asthe corpora and they are analyzed in qualitative and quantitative ways. In the study process,Independent samples-T test is employed for finding out those theme types and patterns ofthematic progression which bear significant differences in English and Chinese moviereviews.The major findings of the current study can be summarized as below:For the choice of different types of themes, the two groups of movie reviews aredominated by simple themes and unmarked themes. No significant differences exist in simplethemes between the two groups. In multiple themes, textual themes are used more frequentlythan interpersonal themes. There is a significant difference in the choice of textual themes butno differences in interpersonal themes between the two groups. In terms of markedness, Chinese writers choose more marked themes than English writers. By contrast, moreunmarked themes occur in English movie reviews than in Chinese movie reviews. Significantdifferences are found in marked themes and unmarked themes between the two groups.As for TP patterns, the sequence in English movie reviews is: the same theme, thecontinuous, the irregular, the alternative, the same rheme, and the T1+R1-T2.While thesequence of TP patterns in Chinese movie reviews is: the same theme, the irregular, thecontinuous, the same rheme, the alternative, and the T1+R1-T2. Besides, the similaritiesbetween the two groups are: first, all six patterns occur in the two language corpora; second,three thematic progression patterns, including, the same theme pattern, the continuous patternand the irregular pattern, occupy the dominant position in both groups; third, the same themepattern takes the highest proportion while the T1+R1-T2pattern occupies the lowestproportion in the two groups. The differences existing in the two groups are: first, more TPpatterns are exploited in English movie reviews than in Chinese movie reviews; second, thesequences of six thematic progression patterns in English movie reviews and Chinese moviereviews are dissimilar to each other; third, more irregular, same rheme pattern are exploited inChinese movie reviews, more continuous, alternative patterns are used in English moviereviews. Based on the above statistics, the author applies independent samples-T test tofurther explore those TP patterns which bear significant differences between English andChinese movie reviews. The final results reveal that significant differences exist in threepatterns of thematic progression between the two groups. They are the same rheme pattern,the continuous pattern, and the irregular pattern. Besides, no significant differences are foundin the same theme pattern, the alternative pattern, and the T1+R1-T2pattern.This study extends the application of TP patterns and proves the feasibility of Theme&Rheme theory and the theory of TP patterns in the genre of movie reviews. Meanwhile, it isconductive for students to better understand the typological features of the two languages,and the differences in culture and thinking patterns between Chinese and westerners, whichwill further help students reach an in-depth comprehension of English and Chinese language.Besides, this study sheds light on future teaching, writing and translating of movie reviews. |
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