A Comparative Study On English And Chinese Disaster News Based On Thematic Progression Theory

News is an indispensable part of people's life.Scholars at home and abroad have conducted a lot of researches on news texts,and they have gained abundant accomplishments.However,few scholars have done researches on disaster news,especially the comparative study of English and Ch inese disaster news.The frequent occurrence of disasters have drawn people's extensive attention to the reports of disasters.Thus,based on Theme and Thematic progression theory,this research analyzes English and Chinese disaster news texts to help peop le understand disaster news better.As an essential means of texts analysis,thematic progression combines thematic structure with textual coherence,which can reveal the dynamic distribution of Theme and Rheme in texts and the way of textual organization.Scholars at home and abroad have probed into the thematic progression patterns of texts of the same or different genres,and explored the similarities and differences in the employment of thematic progression patterns.However,the researches on thematic progression patterns of disaster news are still rare.In view of this,bas ed on Halliday's Theme theory and Huang Guowen's thematic progression theory,this thesis does a comparative research on English and Chi nese disaster news texts with the methods of quantitative research and qualitative research.It aims to investigate the distributing characteristics of Theme and thematic progression patterns in English and Chinese disaster news texts,and then find out th e similarities and differences in the two kinds of news.Then,some reasons will be explored.In addition,how thematic progression patterns contribute to textual cohesion and coherence will be explored.This thesis randomly selects 30 pieces of English di saster news and 30 pieces of Chinese disaster news from the official websites of The Washington Post and People's Daily.All the news have equivalent length and are reported from March,2016 to June,2016.Then,the software SPSS 17.0 and Microsoft Excel are employed for data statistics.This thesis discovers that there are both similarities and differences about the employment of Theme and thematic progression patterns in the two kinds of news texts,and that thematic progression patterns play an important role in news writing.Besides,the reasons for similarities and differences are explored,like the characteristics of disaster news,the selection of news subjects,news genres,language types,human cognition,and ways of thinking.This study is beneficial to both theory and practice.Practically,this study once again proves that it is feasible to use the systematic functional grammar,especially the Theme and thematic progression theory,to analyze texts.Practically,the research on the thematic progression patterns in news can help readers master the skeleton of texts better and grasp the main idea of news,which can improve reading efficiency.Meanwhile,the study helps editors know better about the internal structure of news and organize the information structure more reasonably.In addition,this study provides some guidelines for text learning and teaching.