A Contrastive Analysis Of Thematic Progression Patterns In English And Chinese Diplomatic Speeches

Along with the continuous development of globalization, there has appeared an increasing number ofcommunications between countries and international organizations. As an effective intercommunicationmethod, dipomatic speeches play an indispensable part in foreign affairs. Due to the particularity of itsgenre and the people they are presenting to, the language application in diplomatic speeches are usuallyquite compact, concise and precise. It is convinced that the analysis of this kind of texts could inspire thelanguage performance of the formal style.Recent years, the Thematic Progression patterns, as a effective text analysis method, have been widelyemployed in the contrastive research of different languages and genres. This thesis summarizes eight TPpatterns including: continuous pattern, constant theme pattern, constant rheme pattern, crossing pattern,combine progression pattern, derived theme pattern, split rheme pattern and irregular pattern. This researchanalyzes Chinese and English diplomatic speeches based on the TP patterns. The author randomly selectstotally30speeches delivering by China and U.S. representatives at international conferences from thewebsite of the United States Department of State and Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republicof China randomly. Targeting at the research objectives, this research designs three major problems: firstly,what are the TP patterns utilized in English and Chinese diplomatic speeches and what are their frequencies?Secondly, what are the similarities and differences of distribution of TP patterns in English and Chinesediplomatic speeches? Thirdly, what are the main reasons causing such distributions?According to the research results, it indicates that although Chinese and English diplomatic speechesshare some similarities on selecting TP patterns, differences also exist in the selection of TP patternsbetween the two language. English uses continuous patterns more than Chinese while Chinese prefersconstant theme pattern. Chinese applies split rheme patter wider and also compared with English, Chinesetakes a higher proportion of combine progression pattern. In addition, this paper also probes some possiblereasons of causing such diversities.This paper is divided into five chapters.First chapter makes a simple introduction about this research including research background, research significance, research objectives and the organization of the paper.Chapter two is literature review. It is about the theories and research literature related to this study,such as the notion and classification of Theme and thematic progression patterns, it also summarizes TPpatterns utilized in this paper based on the research findings both domestic and abroad.Chapter three introduces research design, which mainly covers research questions, data selection,research method and procedures and also a detailed illustration of the definition and classification of Themeand Thematic Progression patterns.Chapter four works as the major part of this study and concentrates on data analysis and resultsdiscussions. Firstly, it selects one sample text from the English and Chinese diplomatic speechesrespectively and classifies and analyzes the TP patterns according to the definition and classification of TPpatterns. Secondly, classify all the TP patterns in the whole corpus and figure out the statistic results.Thirdly, make an overview about the similarities and differences of all the TP patterns between English andChinese. Finally, due to the existed diversities of research results, this study also carries on some attributionanalysis.The five chapter is the conclusion part. This chapter concludes the major findings of this research,implications and limitations of this research and suggestions to further study.All in all, this study undertakes contrastive analysis of TP patterns under the diplomatic background,and it helps the learners to master the features of formal style and the skills of writing and translation, in themeantime, it could also promote the comprehension of English learners to better understand diplomaticspeeches and enhance the cross-cultural awareness.