Thematic progression in English literary and legislative texts (original) (raw)

The focus of the current research is on Thematic Progression of English literary and legislative texts. The research aims at identifying and describing the Thematic Progression patterns characteristic of English literary and legislative texts. This study aims at exploring Theme-Rheme structure which plays an important role in organizing and analyzing discourse. Thematic progression patterns deal with the set of meaningful sense groups which constitute a coherent discourse. Daneš (1974) was first who introduced Thematic Progression and presented it as a skeleton of the plot. He proposed four Thematic Progression types: Simple Linear thematic progression, Constant thematic progression, thematic progression with Derived Themes and Split Rheme. Thematic realization makes to cohesive development of the text, thus Thematic Progression patterns can describe a specific genre. The research was conducted utilizing two approaches, that is the data was analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. The qualitative functional analysis of the texts was carried out with the focus on the thematic-rhematic sequences in text sentences to establish Thematic Progression patterns. The contrastive analysis was employed to highlight the similarities and differences in the use of Thematic Progression patters in the English literary and legislative texts. Finally, the calculation of the relative frequency of occurrence of Thematic Progression patterns in two types of texts revealed the characteristic features of ordering ideas in two different genres of English texts. The research demonstrated that the Thematic Progression characteristics can be claimed to be genre specific.