英文新闻文体的主位推进模式研究

1、题目:英文新闻文体的主位推进模式研究a study on thematic progression patterns of english news摘要主位和主位推进模式是分析语篇的重要手段。任何一种语言的语篇中，每个句子都可以 划分为主位和述位。语篇屮前后句子的主位和述位之间会发生某种联系和变化，形成主位推 进，从而构成连贯的语篇。本文基于韩礼德的主述位理论和徐盛桓的主位推进模式理论，以 voa和bbc的广播新闻为资料来源，通过数据对比分析对英语广播新闻语篇的主位和主位 推进模式进行研究。通过对30篇英语广播新闻不同休裁的对比研究，试图解决以下问题：一、英语广播新闻语篇 屮不同主位的分布特点

2、如何；二、英语广播新闻语篇的连贯性是否可以通过主位和述位实现; 三、英语广播新闻语篇的主位推进模式特点。通过对英语新闻广播语篇的主位和主位推进模式分析，以期提高学生的新闻听力水平，并对 新闻听力教学冇所启发。关键词：主位述位主位推进模式广播新闻abstracttheme and thematic progression are important tools in analyzing texts. each clause of texts in any language can be identified as theme and rheme. themes and rhemes in sen

3、tences will produce certain relation and variation, which is called thematic progression. through it, coherence of texts can be realized. based on halliday's thematic theory and xu shenghuan's tp patterns, this thesis collects data from voa and bbc as sources and studies theme and thematic p

4、rogression (tp) patterns of english broadcast news by data comparison.through the contrast and comparison among different types of english broadcast news, this thesis aims to clear up the following questions： (l)what are the features of the distribution of themes in english broadcast news? (2) wheth

5、er the coherence of english broadcast news can be realized by theme and rheme? (3) what are the features of the tp patterns of english broadcast news? by analyzing themes and tp panerns of english broadcast news, the thesis aims to help students improve their ability of comprehending broadcast news

6、at the same time, the study also provides an enlightenment in teaching of news listeningkey words: theme rheme thematic progression pattern broadcast newscontents摘要abstract2introduction41. literature review6theme and thematic progression patterns61.11 theme and rheme61.12thematic progression pattern

7、61.2 english news style82. study of english broadcast news111.1 data collection112.2 procedures112.4results133. discussion15(2) similarities in theme distribution15(3) difference in theme distribution15(4) similarities in tp patterns16(l) more parallel patternsin three types of english broadcast new

8、s16(li) less crossing patterns in three types of english broadcast news17(5) difference in tp patterns17(2) more continuous patterns in politics & business english broadcast news17(3) more concentrated patterns in sports english broadcast news18conclusion19bibliography20acknowledgements21introdu

9、ction"we are aware of our responsibility to our critics. we are also aware of our responsibility to the author, who probably would not have authorized the publication of these pages. this responsibility we accepted wholly and we would willingly bear it alone.this is an excerpt from the prelude

10、to one of saussure's books (saussure, f.de.1915). the italic "responsibility as a complement should be put after the verb “accept"，but it is put at the beginning of the sentence and becomes a departure point of sentence this linguistic phenomenon refers to thematic structure which belo

11、ngs to the theory of systematic functional grammar.the concept of thematic progression is first proposed by danes. he puts forward three main types of thematic progression (tp) patterns: simple linear pattern, constant theme pattern and derived theme pattern in china, scholars also make intensive st

12、udies on tp patterns and give their own tp models, such as xu shenghuan, zhu yongsheng, huang yan ect. thematic progression is one of the important ways to realize textual coherence and plays a significant role in the comprehending of a text. through finding the features of tp pattern, we may grasp

13、where the text is going. just like halliday said, "by analyzing the thematic features, we can gain an insight into its texture and understand how the writer made it clear to us the nature of his underlying concerns. in addition, different genres have their own tendency of patterns of thematic p

14、rogression. in the past several decades, many linguists have conducted intensive researches and empirical studies on tp patterns in genre analysis. nwogu made a research on medical texts. zhaohong and yu weishen carried out studies of advertisement. francis made a comparative research between news r

15、eports, editorials and readersletters. he found that the employment of tp patterns was tightly related with the genres. in his conclusion, news report employs more constant theme and constant rheme patterns. but in editorials and readers9 letters, simple linear pattern is employed frequently. based

16、on previous discourse analysis in terms of theme and rheme, the emphasis lies on the analysis of theme selection and information distribution in journalistic texts such as editorials, letters from readers, the texts in newspaper. however, few such researches have been conducted in the field of broad

17、cast news. besides this, many students find it is very difficult to grasp the main idea when they listen to the broadcast news. therefore, this thesis aims to find out the features of the distribution of themes and tp patterns in broadcast news and hopes that may shed some light on the study of list

18、ening.the present thesis consists of five parts part one introduces what the thesis is about. part two reviews theories of theme and tp patterns and the studies on english news style part three provides a contrastive study among different types of english broadcast news, part four discusses the resu

19、lts of the research in detail part five concludes the present study, reflects on its limitations and provides some suggestions for future study.l literature reviewtheme and thematic progression patter ns1>11 theme and rhemethe term theme was firstly defined as “the starting point of utterancen ,b

20、y vitem mthesius, the fonder of prague school. then many scholars, for example, frantisek danes, jan firbas and randolph quirk did extensive research on this tcim. in the 1960s m.a.k halliday raised the thematic theory to the discourse level, and put it into his systemic functional gram ma 匚 accordi

21、ng to halliday, “the theme is the element which serves as the point of departure of the message; it is that with which the clause is concerned.n (halliday 2000:37) “the remainder of the message, he part in which the theme is developed, is called the rheme.(halliday 2000:37) theme is the element that

22、 serves as the starting point of clause, rheme is the statement，description and explanation of this starting point. in the process of language communication, theme is mostly the share information of each other, rheme is the new information which the speaker wants to tell. so, identifying the themes

23、and rhemes of clauses can help us know the intention of speaks better. there are various types of theme, and different themes have different function. halliday divided themes into simple theme, multiple theme and clausal theme. "simple theme refers to the theme that represents only one mcta-fun

24、ction, which may be ideational, interpersonal, or textual function. ” (kong naizhuo,2002) "multiple theme refers to the theme which consists of more than one functional element of different meta-functions/xkong naizhuo,2002) when a sentence consists of two or more clauses, and the whole clause

25、that comes first forms the theme, separated to the rheme by punctuation or a conjunction. such kind of themes is called clausal theme.l>12thematic progression patternif the thematic theory only operated on the level of clause, it could not be adequate in the discourse of a language. so, another p

26、rague school linguist danes (danes, f. functional sentence perspective and the organization of the text. in f danes(ed) papers on functional sentence perspective, the hague： mouton, 1974), who is the first to put forward the concept of thematic progression (tp) emphasized the organization in whole t

27、exts. he holds that thematic progression is to indicate "where do themes come from, and how do they relate to other themes and rhemes in the text?" three main types of tp patterns are proposed by him, which can be shown as follows:(l) simple linear pattern: each r(rheme) becomes the t(them

28、e) of the next clause.t1r1t2 (=r1)r2t3 (=r2)r3(li) constant theme pattern: theme of the first clause is continuously the themes of the following clauses.t1r1t2 (=t1)r2t3 (=t1)r3(lii) derived theme pattern: the following themes are derived from the previous theme.t/ ! tlr1t2r2t3r3at home, a lot of li

29、nguists have made intensive studies on tp patterns as well and gave their own tp patterns. xu (徐盛桓,1982) proposed four common tp patterns of english texts in 1982, after analyzing a large amount of english texts. the tp patterns of zhu(朱永生,1995) and yan(严世 y青,2001) are mainly four types: the same th

30、eme, the same rheme, continuous pattern and alternative pattern. on the basis of these studies and analysis, huang(黄彳汀,1985:3236) brings forward a six-pattern model, among which the first four patterns are the same as xu(徐盛桓).the rest two patterns are respectively coordinate pattern and derivative p

31、attern. the tp patterns of these scholars are a little similar with each other, so we choose one model using in our study. as tp patterns opposed by xu are based on english analysis and our study objective is english broadcast news, we will adopt xu's model in our present study. now, we'll l

32、ist them on by one in detail.(1) parallel patternit takes the theme of the first clause as the starting point, the rest of the clause take this theme as their respective theme.tlr1t2 (=t1)r2tn (=t1)rnfor examplebeijing (tl) is a city.it (t2) is a big city.it (t3) is the capital of china.(2) concentr

33、ated patternall the rhemes, except the first rheme, come from the first rheme or part of the first rheme.tlr1t2r2 (=r1)tnrn (=r1)for examplechina is in asia. (rl) japan is in asia. (r2)and india is in asia too. (r3)(3) continuous patternthe rheme or part of the rheme in the first clause becomes the

34、theme in the next clause.tlrlt2 (=r1)r2tn (=rn-l)rnfor examplemary (t1) bought a carpet. (r1)it (t2) was made in turkey. (r2)turkey (t3) is a country in asia. (r3)(4) crossing patternthe theme in the first clause becomes the rheme of the second clause; the theme of the second clause becomes the rhem

35、e of the third clauset1r1t2r2 (=t1)tnrn (=tn-1)for examplethe play (tl) was interesting, (rl)but i (t2) did not enjoy it. (r2)a young wan and a young woman (t3) troubled me. (r3)3.2 english news stylethough our study focus on english broadcast news, there are few previous works on it，and english bro

36、adcast news which can be regarded as a band or variety of english news has the universal features of english news. the works devoted to the english news as a whole will be useful to the present studynews can be defined as “the timeliest report of facts that have just happened, are happening or will

37、happen". the function of news is to transmit information on time. the language of news should be accurate, brief and informative. news consists of many sub-categories, which has own characteristics. therefore, it is necessary to know the classification of it. according to content, news can be d

38、ivided into news of politics, business, law, education, science, sports and so on. based on the mode of transmission, news can be divided into radio news, tv news and news in newspaper.scholars both at home and abroad have studied english news from various aspects. many studies on english news from

39、1980s to early 1990s are based on the rhetoric features of news and their effects o the reader, such as grammatical categories, lexical categories and figures of speech. another trend of studies on english news is based on transformational 一generative grammar and formal stylistic. these studies main

40、ly find out the phonological, lexical and syntactic features. there are also some scholars who studied english news based on functional stylistics. such as zhang delu(张德禄,1988),he makes a comprehensive study on the stylistic features of english news by applying the halliday functional gram ma 匚 zhan

41、g analyzes english news from the aspects such as its textual structural, semantic features and grammatical features.broadcast news, as a branch of news has the general characteristics of news for example, the structure is inverted triangle, and the important information is put at the beginning of te

42、xt. broadcast news is delivered through radio or internet. in order to make the news well-received by listeners and attract the listener's attention, the language of news must be simple and neat. because the timeliness of broadcast news, paragraphs are short and pithy, and by the connection of e

43、ach paragraphs does not rely on the conjunctive worlds but by the internal logical relations.nowadays, information has become an essential component of people's daily life throughout the world. listening to broadcast news is an important way to get information. but many students find it difficul

44、t to understand english broadcast news. they even can，t grasp the main idea of news. after listening news, except remember some times and places, they even don't know what the news talks about. so, through the study of tp patterns of broadcast news, the internal logical relations of news can be

45、found out. this will help listeners understand the organization of the news, and how the author organizes message textually. this will be helpful for students in listening to english news and shed some light on the teaching of listening2. study of english broadcast news(2) data collectionas differen

46、t types of discourse may emphasize on different information, their language, thematic structure and tp patterns will be different from each other. considering that english broadcast news may be divided into politics news, business news, sports news in terms of content, we focus on these different st

47、yles here aiming to find out the overall features of tp patterns in this genre.to fulfill the need of the present study, the author builds a small-scale corpus, which consists of 30 news scripts: 10 politics news and 10 business news and 10 sports news. the news scripts are collected from the two in

48、fluential news broadcast: bbc and voa. both of them are the biggest news broadcast in the world. they provide authoritative information in natural english on culture, economy, politics and so on, which has a strong influence on english learners.to ensure the reliability of the study, all the 30 news

49、 scripts have similar textual length and arc randomly chosen from october 2009 to march 2010. due to the difficulties in having the accurate scripts of broadcast news from radio, all of the news scripts used in the study are obtained from bbc' and voa' official websites.(2) proceduresthere a

50、re altogether 5 steps in the present study. each step and the detailed explanation are clearly elaborated as follows:(l )both theme and rheme in each clause in the present corps and the repeated theme and rheme of each clause are identified. the detailed explanation of how repeated themes and rhemes

51、 are identified will be introduced in the following notes partefforts will be laid on to determine the number of simple theme, multiple theme and clausal theme.according to four tp patterns provided by xu(徐盛桓)，identify the repeated elements belong to which tp pattern.count the number of each tp patt

52、ern occurring in politics news, business news and sports news respectively.a11 the numbers concerned will be presented by using tables.notes:as it is hardly possible to find out the discourse in which the repeated themes and rhemes are the exactly same, linguists propose that repetition of the theme

53、 and rheme not only refers to the exact world but the world with logical semantic relation. taking this point into consideration, xu(徐盛 桓，1982) proposed seven logical semantic relations in identifying how theme or rheme can equal to next theme and rheme. to make it clear when can be adopted in tp an

54、alysis, we hereby introduce his category of logical relations as follows:whole-part (<) (this sign stands for this kind of relation, so is the following.)house <sitting room new york <manhattanwhen “a house5 occurs in theme or rheme part of one sentence and "a sitting room" in eit

55、her part of the following one, the two parts can be related with"= take the following sentences as an example:jane (tl)/bought a new house last week (rl).the sitting room (t2)/was decorated well (r2).in this example, r1 can said equal to t2, i.e.rl=r2set-element (w “element-element (-)january e

56、 year january-february/march-februaryone year (t1 )/includes 12 months (rl). january (t2)/is the first month. february (t3)/is the second month.in this example, t2 and t3 can be regarded as identical to tl, i.e.tl=t2=t3.general-specific (<=)animal <= tiger furniture <= sofa-bedwe(tl )/neecl

57、 to buy some furniture (rl). a sofa-bed (t2)/is our priority (r2).as we can see, "furniture" is a general concept while 'sofa-bed is more specific. therefore, rl is equal to t2, i.e.rl=t2.implication (=)raining 9 wet streetoutside (tl)/it was raining hard (rl). the wet street (t2) kept

58、 them from making a dash for it (r2). in this example, the fact that it was raining can imply that the street must be wet, therefore, we say “r1=t2,opposition (h)exported 丰 imported cheap 工 expensivethe exported volume this year (t1 )/increased to 100 millions dollars (rl). the imported volume (t2)/

59、 remained the same as that of last year (r2).as "export" and "import5 are two opposite concepts in the field of foreign trade, they can be regarded as identical, that is to say "t1=t2,co-occurrence (<->)time <-> clockthe time (tl)/dragged on (rl). the clock (t2)/seemed to refuse to strike twelve (r2). the 'time，and 'clock，in this example refe