A Case Study of Commencement Speech from the Perspective of Thematic Progression Pattern

As a unique discourse genre,public speaking plays an important role in conveying the speaker’s position,gaining consensus of public opinion,even initiating a call and arousing the audience’s actions.Based on a commencement speech from the School of Medicine of Tsinghua university,this paper identifies four types of thematic progression pattern,their use and discourse features,the speech purpose and its gist,the distribution of different types of thematic progression pattern within the framework of the Theme-Rheme progression pattern of Systemic Functional Linguistics.By doing so,the speaker’s state position,alma mater position and her individual position are conveyed respectively and it is of significance to provide reference for the organization method of speech discourse during the special epidemic period.

The Study of Thematic Progression Patterns in TEM8 News Discourse

This paper studies thematic progression patterns of 20 news items in TEM8 based on the theories of theme and rheme.The use frequencies of three thematic progression patterns are calculated and analyzed to propose some implications on improving listening comprehension.

The Thematic Progression Patterns and Text Analysis of Necklace

This paper is an attempt to discuss the relationship between genre and the thematic progression. Through qualitative analysis of the short story Necklace of Maupassant, it is found that narrative texts always use the linear theme pattern and the constant theme pattern, and sometimes the derived theme pattern and other patterns are also used to facilitate the text coherence and the plot development. Thematic progression in various fields has been studied extensively, but the analysis aims to short story is less than text coherence and other aspects. And there are some implications to teaching, writing, reading, and translation.

Application of Theme-Rheme Theory to News Translation

News,as an important way of communication is playing a crucial role in the comprehensive development of our country ranging from fast economic expansion,giant leap in science and technology,and progress in every aspects of social life.There is no doubt that News translation,in its specific and special way serves as an effective tool in spreading all sorts of information to a larger base of readers as rapid as possible.The function of the News is the transmission of information covering great events happening both at home and abroad in a timely and accurate manner.The information structure and the main ThemeRheme structure functions belong to the language of discourse.As we know,English pays emphasis on hypotactic relations while Chinese pay more attention to paratactic relations.What is more,English is the subject-predominant language with subject-predicate pattern easy to identify while Chinese is the topic-predominant language with topic-comment patterns as its prototype.The paper selects a large number of news items covering a wide range of subjects from CCTV news channel website and the Xinhua net as the paper’s corpus,Through the comparative study of both English and Chinese at the level of sentence then to text,the paper is trying to analyze the similarities and dissimilarities of source language and target language in their conversion process.Meanwhile,this paper draws a new conclusion that Theme-Rheme structures help us find the semantic connections between source language and target language.The novel point is that this is a two-way communication,namely,not only is the target language in accordance with source language,but also the source language conforms to the habitual usage of target language,realizing the stylistic equivalence between two texts.In a sense,the study of Theme-Rheme structure provides a great boost to the News Translation.