Theme―Rheme Analysis of English Sports News.docVIP

Theme―Rheme Analysis of English Sports News As a functional style，sports news English has aroused attention and concern of the stylists. This thesis chooses the report of 2011 Winbledon Games by New York Times and The Sun. This paper analyzes the style characteristics of theme Rheme system from the aspect of text function， with the purpose of helping people to know more about the writing techniques of English Newspapers. English sport news Theme Rheme 1. Thematic Structure The terms “Theme” and “Rheme” are two important conception in systematic function， which were first put forward by Mathesius， a Czech linguist， in his article “On Functional Sentence Perspective”. He has proposed this idea to study what different functions of different components of sentence play in the language communication. In his terminology， Theme refers to that which is known or at least obvious in the given situation and from which the speaker precedes， and Rheme refers to what the speaker states about， or in regard to， the starting point of the utterance. Hallidayan approach differentiate from Prague approach in that it separate the thematic and information structure， though often overlapping features of text organization. Halliday developed part of Mathesius’s definition into his own： The Theme is the element which serves as the point of departure of the message； it is that which the clause is concerned. The remainder of the message， the part in which the Theme is developed， is called in Prague school terminology the Rheme. A message consists of a Theme and a Rheme. In Hallidayan terminology， the configuration Theme+Rheme is either called “Theme/Rheme structure，” or “Thematic structure” or “Theme structure”. Within the configuration， the Theme is the starting-point for the message； it is the ground from which the clause is taking off， so it can be said that part of the meaning of any clause lies in which element is chosen as its Theme. With different criterio