Thematic choice and progression in English and Chinese radio news texts: a systemic functional analysis
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Lijin Liu
Lijin Liu received his PhD in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics fromShanghai International Studies University and is Professor in Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. His research interests include discourse analysis, pragmatics, systemic functional linguistics, and cognitive linguistics. His recent publications include
The Pragmatics of Logophoricity (2012) and “A typological study of motion events in modern Chinese” (2014,Chinese Teaching in the World , 3).
and
Gordon Tucker
Dr. Gordon Tucker was formerly senior lecturer in the Centre for Language and Communication Research at Cardiff University. Since his retirement he has retained an affiliation with Cardiff University. He is the co-developer, along with Professor Robin Fawcett, of the systemic functional model of language known as the Cardiff Grammar. He is author of
The lexicogrammar of adjectives: A systemic functional approach to lexis (Cassell Academic 1998) and has published over forty journal articles and book chapters.
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.
Funding statement: Funding: The research is supported by the Social Science Funds Project of the Ministry of Education of China (No. 13YJA740033).
About the authors
Lijin Liu received his PhD in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics fromShanghai International Studies University and is Professor in Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. His research interests include discourse analysis, pragmatics, systemic functional linguistics, and cognitive linguistics. His recent publications include The Pragmatics of Logophoricity (2012) and “A typological study of motion events in modern Chinese” (2014, Chinese Teaching in the World, 3).
Dr. Gordon Tucker was formerly senior lecturer in the Centre for Language and Communication Research at Cardiff University. Since his retirement he has retained an affiliation with Cardiff University. He is the co-developer, along with Professor Robin Fawcett, of the systemic functional model of language known as the Cardiff Grammar. He is author of The lexicogrammar of adjectives: A systemic functional approach to lexis (Cassell Academic 1998) and has published over forty journal articles and book chapters.
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- The interplay between agency and constraint: some departures from the organization of talk in the classroom
- Thematic choice and progression in English and Chinese radio news texts: a systemic functional analysis
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- “Wicked” women in contemporary pop culture: “bad” language and gender in Weeds, Nurse Jackie, and Saving Grace
- The interplay between agency and constraint: some departures from the organization of talk in the classroom
- Thematic choice and progression in English and Chinese radio news texts: a systemic functional analysis
- An interactional account of discourse-connective que-constructions in Spanish
- A new perspective on stories in public deliberation: analyzing small stories in discussions about immigration
- Metaphor and the notion of control in trauma talk
