The Study on Thematic Progression Patterns of English News

Abstract

As one of the important ways to analyze discourse, thematic progression is an important way to organize news. It combines the thematic structure and textual coherence, revealing the dynamic distribution of theme and rheme in the discourse and the organization form of the discourse. As the carrier of information, news plays an essential role in people’s daily life. The importance of news has drawn the attention of academic world. Thus, this paper aims to analyze the theme structure and thematic progression patterns in news reports to find out the preferred theme structures and thematic progression patterns. According to the analysis, it can be found that the simple theme is used more than the multiple theme, that the unmarked theme takes up the majority of all themes, and that the most frequently used pattern is the parallel pattern followed by the linear pattern. This study hopes to help editors and readers understand the inner structure of news deeply for effective news reading and news writing.