Thematic choice and progression in English and Chinese radio news texts: a systemic functional analysis

Abstract

This paper reports on a comparative study of thematic choice and progression in English and Chinese radio news texts, conducted within the systemic functional theory of Theme-Rheme (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004) and the thematic progression model evolving from Daneš's work in the 1970s. It is suggested, following a detailed analysis of a corpus of sixty English and Chinese texts, that there are some similarities and disparities in structuring thematic information between the two languages. Overall, the key differences identified are that the English news tends to have a greater incidence of textual, and thus, multiple Themes, whereas the Chinese news tends to allow elliptical participants and circumstantial elements to be thematized more frequently. Such differences can be attributable to the distinctions in grammatical structure across the languages.

Thematic Structure in Students’ Writings: Implications on their Ideas Organization and Development

“…Based on its type, the Unmarked Topical Theme, constituted by subjects dominated by a noun phrase and pronoun, is mostly applied by the students. It is comparable to studies conducted by Bangga (2013), Februana (2014), Jalilifar (20092010), Safitra (2013), Ping (2007), Thalib (2014), Liu & Tucker (2015), Marfuaty andWahyudi (2015), Sianipar (2015), Narita (2016), andJing (2015) which found that subject is typical unmarked Topical Theme in students' writings. Meanwhile, only very limited numbers of marked Topical Themes constituted by dependent clauses, prepositional phrases, and adverbial groups existed as thematic heads observed the essays.…”

“…The limited use of the Interpersonal Theme is related to the nature of the text. Ping (2007), Sianipar (2015), and Undayasari & Saleh's (2015) found that this Theme occurred in exposition texts, while its occurrence is rarely observed in scientific books (Jalilifar, 2009) and English news texts (Liu & Tucker, 2015) and advertorials (Thalib, 2014). In other words, the occurrence of interpersonal Theme is determined by the nature of the texts.…”

“…The high use of these patterns is also observed in articles in journals (Jalilifar, 2010a;Ping et al, 2018) and academic texts (Jalillifar, 2009). On the other hand, Constant Theme is dominantly used in narratives (Februana, 2014;Francis, 1990;Jalilifar, 2010b;Narita, 2016;Safitra, 2013), recount texts (Noviyanty, 2015;Yunita, 2018), descriptive (McCabe & Belmonte, 1998, and news report (Liu & Tucker, 2015;Sharndarma, 2013;Varela, 2014).…”

A Comparative Study of Thematic Progression Patterns Between Narration and Argumentation in New Concept English

“…A number of scholars have explored the relationship between TP patterns and different text types [10][11][12][13]. Meanwhile, some scholars focus on narrations and argumentations.…”