What is it about?
Thematic choice and progression is an important device in English and Chinese texts. We conducted a comparative study to examine if the English and the Chinese radio news differ in selecting and structuring thematic information and how the difference(s) relates (relate) to structural differences between the two languages. We analyzed sixty radio news texts to confirm the difference(s).
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Why is it important?
To warrant greater attention in the “linguistic arena" than do the previous studies, this paper engages in cross-language comparison at two levels. Our findings show that the English radio news entails relatively more textual, and thus, more multiple themes, while the Chinese radio news allows, more frequently, elliptical participants and circumstantial elements to be used as themes. Such differences are caused by the differences in grammatical structure between the two languages.
Perspectives
Writing this article was a great pleasure for me as it was co-authored with the English scholar whose classes I once attended and with whom I have made friends. I hope this article will be more appealing to the readers than previous studies, in terms of the topic, methodology, data and results.
Lijin LIU
Guangdong University of Foreign Studies
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This page is a summary of: Thematic choice and progression in English and Chinese radio news texts: a systemic functional analysis, Text & Talk - An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language Discourse Communication Studies, January 2015, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/text-2015-0008.
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