A Study Of Themes And The Matic Progression Patterns In English And Chinese Corporate Profiles

With the progress of modernization and informationization, competitions among corporations become increasingly fierce. As a bridge between the corporation and potential clients, corporate profiles play a very important role in conveying information to the public and promoting products or services. Therefore, they are indispensable for the development of companies. Theme refers to the element appearing at the very beginning of the clause. Thematic progression(TP) is the development of the whole text promoted by connections among themes. It is of great importance in discourse analysis. The patterns of thematic progression advanced by famous scholars contribute a lot to text development and coherence of information.Based on Hallidayan thematic structure theory, five thematic progression patterns and Xu Shenghuan’s seven logical semantic relations, the thesis reports a study conducted to probe into similarities and differences between English and Chinese corporate profiles in theme and TP pattern distributions, find out possible reasons for these similarities and differences and finally give corresponding suggestions to writers of English or Chinese corporate profiles.The author identified 30 English corporate profiles and 30 Chinese corporate profiles respectively from the official websites of 60 corporations(i.e. 30 American corporations and 30 Chinese corporations) selected randomly from the World Fortune Top 500 in 2014. Then by empirical researches and data comparison, the thesis explored the Theme and Thematic Progression patterns of English and Chinese corporate profiles. The results show that both similarities and differences exist in the distributions of themes and TP patterns between English and Chinese corporate profiles. In both corpora, simple Theme is the most frequently adopted; unmarked Theme takes a higher percentage than marked Theme; Constant Theme Pattern and Constant Rheme Pattern are commonly used. Compared with English corporate profiles, Chinese ones use more simple themes, more marked themes and fewer Simple Linear patterns. The similar points can be mainly attributed to the same genre that the English and Chinese corporate profiles belong to and the same communicative purpose that they have; while the differences result from their different grammatical structures, thinking models and writing patterns.This study is expected to help the readers of corporate profiles understand the information flow of this genre exactly; provide a clear clue for its writers and help them find the best TP patterns to match the corporate profiles, which will optimize the goals of the corporate profiles; help translators of corporate profiles learn the differences and similarities between English and Chinese corporate profiles, and practice these rules in their later work. Although the study is sampled with corporate profiles, its results and effects are far beyond the scope of corporate profiles. The result of this study can also be used as guidance and reference for linguistic study in other genres.