Thematic Progression and Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Thematic progression is a very important means for discourse construction. Different types of discourse will choose different thematic progression patterns in order to realize their different communicative purposes. Analyzing discourse through thematic progression pattern is helpful to understand the content and organization of the discourse. This paper uses Halliday’s [1] Theme-Rheme Theory and Zhu’s [2] four patterns of thematic progression to analyze Obama’s inaugural speech. It founds that the simple theme, unmarked theme and the constant thematic progression pattern are used mostly to achieving the communicative purposes.