A theme-based text analysis of an academic abstract in english and Chinese

Abstract

This paper centers on the employment of Theme-related theories to analyze how academic abstracts unfold coherently in English and Chinese versions. By quantitatively exploring the distribution of these theories and ways they are progressed, the findings show that the two versions adopt simple Themes and multiple Themes in a completely opposite way, and their progressive patterns also differentiate with each other significantly. However, they seem to keep a similar trend of developing unmarked and marked Themes through the two versions of the abstract.