A Study On Thematic Choice In Tuoi Tre And Vnexpress English News Reports

Abstract

The Theme works together within a text to achieve coherence and cohesion. Based on Halliday’s theory on Theme - Rheme structure, this paper is conducted to primarily explore the thematic structure and analyze the frequency of Themes that appeared in 80 news reports retrieved from Tuoi Tre and VnExpress International newspapers. The results show that the Unmarked Theme is more frequent than the Marked Theme in both newspapers. The Participant Topical Theme is the most dominant, followed by Textual Theme. In Tuoi Tre, Interpersonal Theme is in the last position, but it is not found in VnExpress. Additionally, among Simple Theme, nominal group is most commonly adopted in Theme of the analyzed news reports. The findings also present that other thematic structures including Predicated Theme, Thematic equative, and Existential ‘There’ are employed with a limited extent.