A Comparative Study Of Thematic Progression Patterns Between English Argumentation And English Narration

Thematic progression has been a hot topic in modern textual linguistics. In recent years, more and more linguists have recognized that the cohesion in a text must take a full consideration of the relationship between theme and rheme as well as thematic progression and only in this way people can make correct description of both textual construction and textual decoding. As the realization of thematic structure in textual development, thematic progression has been applied more often to do textual analysis. Patterns of thematic progression reveal that how themes are repeated and transformed again and again in the process of verbal communication. Obviously, under different scopes of thematic progression patterns, there exist various inter-sentential relationships. Because of and the various types of information flowing, logical relations and textual developing patterns in the target texts, various functions of textual construction are finally produced. All in all, with the help of the diverse patterns of thematic progression, different kinds of texts, which are of rich content, strict and diverse structures are constructed.As an important mechanism for textual construction, thematic progression has drawn much attention of linguists all over the world for a long time. In the previous researches, scholars have studied thematic progression patterns from the same perspective relatively; modeling and simplification seem to be two main features of their research ideas. They often make use of thematic progression patterns to analyze individual texts or particular types of text, narrations and news texts in particular. By far, few people make a comparative study of the combined features and the applicability of each patters of TP from the perspective of the type of text. This thesis adopts the research methods of comparative analysis, qualitative and quantitative analysis, inductive and so on to interpret the patterns of TP in a new angle supported by Theme-Rheme Theory and Thematic Progression Theory. On the basis of the previous researches both at home and abroad, this thesis summarizes four main patterns of thematic progression, which are feasible and applicable in textual analysis, and makes a comparative study of their performance in English argumentations and narrations. After detailed study and analysis of TP patterns in these two types of text respectively, this thesis tries to find out the feature of the distribution of TP patterns in English argumentations and narrations respectively, and to prove the conclusion that due to pursuing different communication goals and expressing effects, different types of texts have different inclinations in choosing the TP patterns. Moreover, it also makes a comparative analysis of the underlying reasons, which can account for similarities and differences between their choosing inclinations.The study of this thesis has both theoretical and practical meanings. In theory, it emphasizes that Theme-Rheme Theory and TP patterns are two important theories for textual analysis, they play an important role in textual construction, textual development and semantic coherence. It gives a better explanation for Thematic Progression Theory and broadens the scope of thematic progression research. Moreover, it promotes the further development of Thematic Progression Theory and improves the explanatory power of Theme-Rheme Theory and its branches in the practical application. In practice, the detailed analysis in this thesis helps to summarize the relationship between patterns of TP and text types, which has great guiding significance for English text teaching. Adopted in reading teaching, it can help students have a better understanding of textual construction and textual development of each text type, then seize the main information of the text quickly and accurately. Adopted in writing teaching, it can help students form a good habit for writing, improve their abilities in designing a text and make them be able to deal with different types of writing. The study of this thesis is also very useful and beneficial for other teaching practices, like translating learning and teaching and so on.