An investigation into thematic structure of English and Vietnamese newspaper headlines

Abstract

This study in Functional Grammar attempts to investigate the way thematic structure is presented in newspaper headlines. To set out the theoretical framework for analysis, theme/rheme theories by different linguists are consulted and the Systemic Functional Grammar of M.A.K Halliday is especially focused on. The paper presents the results of a descriptive qualitative research conducted basing on a four day corpus of the headlines taken from The New York Times and Vnexpress newspapers. The findings of the study indicate that of all the themes, Newspaper headlines tend to employ the simple themes so as to make the reader understand easily. The majority of themes in news headlines are unmarked themes, which is because of the consideration of drawing readers’attention to the content. Among three elements which form the experiential part of a theme, participant appears most, circumstance the second and process the last. Process as experiential element is always used to appeal while participant and circumstance are used to state. Their different roles decide their different distributions. Considering the absence of contrasting English and Vietnamese newspaper headlines, this study was also an attempt to conduct a contrastive analysis between the newspaper headlines of English and Vietnamese languages in order to explore how they are different. Utilizing contrastive analysis, the researcher analyzed the variability of syntactic and semantic features across and within the English and Vietnamese headlines. It was concluded that they are similar in theme in English and Vietnamese is at the initial position of the clause. They are expressed in phrasal structures including noun phrases, adjective phrases, verb phrases, prepositional phrase and in sentential structures. However, thematic structure in the two languages contains some certain differences. In English, we find out some types of Theme that do not exist in Vietnam, such as Predicated Theme, and unmarked