Abstract
The patterns of thematic progression, greatly influenced by culture-peculiar thinking patterns and language-particular features, reflect the integration of form and meaning in the flow of information in discourse. The economic discourse has its distinct linguistic characteristics and important communicative purposes. Thus, related research on the thematic progression of economic discourse is important for us to understand the language use in the context of economic and financial activities and also has important implications for language learning and teaching, translation, automated language information processing etc. This study first employs CiteSpace, a document visualization tool, to review the existing related studies on the economic discourse in China, and then analyzes the major patterns of thematic progression in the economic discourse based on the English and Chinese reports from The Economist. Through our discussion, we aim to explore universals and peculiarities of thematic progression in English-Chinese economic discourse and discuss the reasons attributing to major distinctions between the two languages in terms of thematic progression.
Highlights
The patterns of thematic progression, greatly influenced by culture-peculiar thinking patterns and language-particular features, reflect the integration of form and meaning in the flow of information in discourse
We aim to explore universals and peculiarities of thematic progression in English-Chinese economic discourse and discuss the reasons attributing to major distinctions between the two languages in terms of thematic progression
This study will discuss the issue of thematic progression of economic discourse using some English reports in The Economist and Chinese translation as bilingual data, aiming to answer these questions: a) What are the characteristics of thematic progression in economic discourse in English and Chinese? b) What strategies of translation are needed if there exists some difference between the two languages?
Summary
The “Theme” and “Rheme” are mainly derived from the Prague school of functional linguistics and Halliday’s systemic functionalism. “Thematic progression” was proposed by Daněs (1970, 1974), who argued that thematic progression establishes connections between sentences in discourse according to the relationship between the current theme and the previous theme. The formulation of the theory of thematic progression has expanded the perspective of language studies beyond the boundary of sentence to the domain of discourse, from the view of the cohesiveness of form and meaning. The classification of thematic progression patterns has differences in different scholars’ doctrines, but the core forms and categories are common. The study of the thematic progression patterns has multiple meanings, demonstrating the integration of form and meaning, exploring the influence of cultural awareness and thinking patterns on discourse organization, and having important implications for a great variety of studies, such as metalinguistic research, language learning and teaching research, translation research, automated language information processing, and artificial intelligence research
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