Author(s)

Jing Li

Corresponding Author

Jing Li

Abstract

Theme works together within a text to achieve coherence and it is a key terminology in written discourse analysis. Based on Halliday’s theories on the theme structures, the primary purpose of this paper is to explore the thematic structures of 13 news reports on the coronavirus abstracted from China daily. With combination of the quantitative and qualitative analysis, the results present that the distribution of simple themes are more frequent than the application of multiple themes and among simple themes nominal groups are most commonly adopted in clauses of the reports. Additionally, other thematic structures including adverbial groups, prepositional phrases, thematic equatives, thematised comments and existential there are also distributed in these news reports. It is of great value for readers to comprehend the written styles and the writer’s evaluation

Keywords

Thematic Structures; Clause; News Report; Coronavirus