Study Of The Thematic Structure And Thematic Progression Patterns In TED Culture Talks

The concept of theme and rheme was proposed by Mathesius who is the representative of Prague School for the first time.Subsequently,Halliday recognized Mathesius‘s findings and pointed out according to its complexity,theme can be divided into simple,multiple and clausal themes and according to its markedness,it can also be divided into unmarked and marked themes.The thematic progression was proposed by the Czech linguist Danes and domestic scholars began to study the theme in 1980 s.Among them,Huang Guowen divided thematic progression into six patterns that are parallel,continuous,alternative,concentrated,derived and coordinate thematic progression patterns.TED talks are short,exquisite and deeply rooted in people‘s hearts,and compared with the political and other types of speeches,culture speeches are closer to people‘s lives,the content is easier to understand and the audience is more.The theme and rheme theories and the thematic progression patterns have been widely used to analyze different types of discourse.Nevertheless,the speech discourse analyses are mainly confined to the political speeches.Based on Halliday‘s theories of the theme and rheme and Huang Guowen‘s six thematic progression patterns,10 TED culture talks are sampled from its official website as the corpus.With the use of qualitative and quantitative research methods,the distributions of thematic structure and thematic progression patterns of TED culture talks are summarized and the reasons are explored,which offers theoretical reference for helping the speech deliverers or the speech draught writers to better arrange the configuration of the speech,and thus to achieve his or her objectives more easily.It is found that according to the complexity of theme,TED culture talks use simple theme the most,followed by multiple theme and clausal theme.In simple themes,the percent of pronoun is the highest,followed by the noun and nominal group,the prepositional group and the adverbial group in order.In multiple themes,the textual component has the higher percent than the interpersonal component.As to the markedness of theme,unmarked themes are used more than the marked themes.Furthermore,in the classification of thematic progression,the more used three patterns are the parallel,continuous and concentrated thematic progression patterns,and the less used three patterns are the derived,alternative and coordinate thematic progression patterns.