Thematic Progression in Economic Discourse: A Case Study of the English-Chinese Reports from The Economist

The patterns of thematic progression, greatly influenced by culture-peculiar thinking patterns and language-particular features, reflect the integration of form and meaning in the flow of information in discourse. The economic discourse has its distinct linguistic characteristics and important communicative purposes. Thus, related research on the thematic progression of economic discourse is important for us to understand the language use in the context of economic and financial activities and also has important implications for language learning and teaching, translation, automated language information processing etc. This study first employs CiteSpace, a document visualization tool, to review the existing related studies on the economic discourse in China, and then analyzes the major patterns of thematic progression in the economic discourse based on the English and Chinese reports from The Economist. Through our discussion, we aim to explore universals and peculiarities of thematic progression in English-Chinese economic discourse and discuss the reasons attributing to major distinctions between the two languages in terms of thematic progression.


Studies
The theme make a l Infrastruct widely us research p (https://cit "主述位" research h keyword c and the lis research o structure, a   In the English original, the themes of the second and third sentences, "Amazon's (vision)" and "Blue Origin's core beliefs", are specific examples of the theme of the first sentence, "Their visions", and thus the three noun phrases have the same reference, carrying on specific discussion about the "vision". On the whole, this discourse shows a typical pattern of parallel progression. 是可重复使用的火箭会降低成本，这样很多人就有机会进入太空 is that reusable rockets will lower costs so that access to space is made possible for many.
In the Chinese translation, "两家公司的愿景" ("the vision of the two companies"), "亚马逊的愿景" ("Amazon's vision") and "蓝色起源的核心信念" ("Blue Origin's core beliefs") also appear as themes as in the English original. In the Chinese translation, the repetition of the noun "愿景" ("vision") appears in "亚马逊的愿 景" ("Amazon's"), firstly, because there is no the same pattern of omission in Chinese as in English, and secondly, it can make the message clearer. In addition, in the Chinese translation, when expressing the content of the relative clause in the second sentence of the original text, since the Chinese language does not have the same syntactic structure, the translator adopts the way of using "this point" as the theme, which refers back to the content expressed by Amazon's, forming a constant progression pattern here. Such a change in Chinese translation shows the effect of English-Chinese differences on the adoption of theme progression patterns, and moreover, the discourse makes the use of the thematic progression patterns flexible and very often more than one pattern are blended to the discourse more informative.
(2) (a) English text: These efforts, however valiant, are in their infancy. First, the English text presents two parallel patterns of thematic progression, where the main positions are: "These efforts/They" (the efforts) and "governments/they (governments)".  In the Chinese translation, first, the unless clause is moved to the head of the Chinese translation from the main clause in the English original, which is an important position for such sentences to express emphasis. Secondly, the theme in Sentence 4 has been changed. In the original English, "they (governments)" are in the position for theme, and the completed regulations and bills are in the position for rheme, and the structure of the whole sentence is light in the head and heavy in the end. Thus, the first sentence and the third sentence form a pattern of parallel thematic progression. From this example, it can be seen that such language-particular characteristic, i.e., that of placing the parts expressing hypothetical conditions or the parts having much length in Chinese, can lead to a change in the thematic progression patterns in English to Chinese translation.

Use of the Constant Progression Pattern
The use of the constant progression pattern is illustrated in (3): (3) (a) English text: Before becoming President, Mr. Trump spent much of his money on golf courses, hotels and other trophy assets that the Times says have since racked up huge tax losses. Thanks to that red ink, it said he paid a mere $750 in federal income taxes in both 2016, the year he was elected, and his first year in office-and not a cent in ten of the previous 15 years. ( In the first and second sentences, the theme of the first sentence is "Mr. Trump", and the theme of the second sentence is "his assets", which is in the rheme in the first sentence. In the second sentence, "the Times" appears in the parenthesis, and in the third sentence it becomes the theme, which forms a parallel pattern of thematic progression.  The Chinese translation shows a change in the thematic progression pattern: the progression pattern lying between the first and second sentences in the English text disappears, and a parallel pattern is formed between the second and the third sentences. The reason for this change should be that Chinese people are accustomed to saying the source of information before the content of information in the reporting language.

Use of the Concentrative Progression Pattern
Example (4) is used to illustrate the use of the concentrative progression pattern: (4) (a) English text: (As he wrote in 2015,) Amazon and AWS may look different, but they share similar underlying principles on which they act.  Amazon and AWS may look different 2 they share similar underlying principles on which they act 3 The same may be true of Amazon and Blue Origin.
In the original English text, a concentrative thematic progression pattern is used between Sentences 1-2 and Sentence 3, the themes different and the rheme unchanged, which refers to "may look different but share similar underlying principles on which they act"; in addition, a parallel progression pattern is formed between Sentences 1 and 2, "the Amazon and AWS" and "they" refer to the same identity. In the Chinese translation, a concentrative progression pattern is used between Sentences 1, 2 and 3. The themes of the two sentences are different, i.e., "亚马逊和 AWS" ("Amazon and AWS") in Sentences 1 and 2 and "蓝色 起源和亚马逊" ("Amazon and Blue Origin") in Sentence 3, and rhemes, although different in form, are the same in meaning, i.e., "看起来可能不同, 遵循相似的基本运作原理" ("may look different" and "follow similar basic operating principles"). In addition, a parallel pattern of thematic progression is formed between Sentence 1 and Sentence 2, where "亚马逊和 AWS" ("Amazon and AWS") and "它们" ("they" ) have the same reference.

Use of the Intersectional Progression Pattern
The intersectional progression composes a more intricate relationship, as illustrated as in (5): (5) (a) English text: The use of data, after all, is now the world's biggest business. Some$1.4trn of the combined $1.9trn market value of Alphabet (the owner of Google) and Facebook, comes from users' data and the firms' mining of it, … (Free the data serfs! The fight back against big tech's feudal lords has begun, Schumpeter, The Economist, 2020, 11. https://www.businessreview.global/zh-CN/latest/5f9b7d1c61cb417f7a0b9a4d?token=0a9bb9962987ef87872d66 449ba35378f41536e5) (b) Chinese translation: 毕竟，对数据的使用是当今世界上最大的买卖。在 Alphabet(谷歌的母公司)和 Facebook 合计 1.9 万亿美元的市值中，…，大约有 1.4 万亿都来自用户数据以及对数据的挖掘。   Table 10. The thematic analysis of the English text in (5) No. of sentences Theme Rheme 1 The use of data is now the world's biggest business 2 Some $1.4trn of the combined $1.9trn market value of Alphabet (the owner of Google) and Facebook comes from users' data and the firms' mining of it In this example, both the English original and the Chinese translation reflect the use of the intersectional progression pattern. The theme of the first sentence is "The use of data", which is placed at the end of the second sentence and becomes the rheme.

Conclusion
The above discussion reveals the prominent patterns which are widely applied in the economic discourse of English and Chinese, i.e., the patterns of parallel progression, constant progression, concentrative progression and intersectional progression. Besides, what the two languages have in common also lies in a common trend in the use of the thematic progression patterns of English-Chinese economic discourse: the flexible use of multiple patterns under the premise of the clear and informative exchange of information. Aside from the sameness, on the other hand, our study also reflects the fact that there are some cross-linguistic differences between English and Chinese when thematic patterns are concerned. Such differences are mainly attributed to these factors determining the choice of thematic progression patterns: First of all, the choice of thematic progression patterns is related to the mode of thinking. English often puts the point of observation or narration on the result or the bearer of an action and takes it as the subject of the sentence; Chinese often focuses on the specific person as the doer of an action first and then on what he or she does, and the subject of the sentence is mostly the noun denoting a person undertaking an action (e.g., Yang, 2008). In (3), for example, the English original focuses on the content of the report and presents the reporter only as a parenthesis, but in the Chinese translation the reporter is put in front as theme, reflecting the focus on the action performer in the way of thinking.
Secondly, the choice of thematic progression patterns is also related to the typological feature that English is subject-oriented and Chinese is topic-oriented, as pointed out by Wang (2009), Du (2004 and Yang (2008). For example, in (1), the topic-oriented Chinese directly has "this point" at the beginning of the sentence, which makes the thematic progression pattern of the Chinese translation different from that of the original English text.
Thirdly, the choice of thematic progression patterns also reflects the way the elements in a sentence are combined, i.e., Chinese reflects the combination of the elements in a sentence by means of meaning while English creates such a combination with connective words, which is also found in the studies such as Deng  (2017), Du (2004).
Fourth, the choice of thematic progression patterns also shows the effect of the characteristics of linear arrangement of words at the head and end of the sentence, with English following the end-heavy principle and Chinese having the head-heavy principle, as discussed in Du (2004). This cross-linguistic difference leads to the variation of the linguistic units in subject position as seen in (2). In the Chinese translation, when the part of the sentence telling about the bills is moved to the beginning of the sentence, the head-light and end-heavy English sentences also become head-heavy and end-light Chinese sentences, and the thematic pattern is thus changed.
The choice of thematic progression patterns does not simply reflect the correspondence and cohesiveness of language forms, but actually reflects the integration of form and meaning in the dynamic flow of information, and more importantly is deeply influenced by cultural awareness and thinking patterns. The economic discourse is characterized by a large amount of information and complex syntactic realization, and the choice of the thematic progression patterns does matter in the course of expressing, understanding and analyzing their literal meaning, implied message and discourse cohesiveness. From a cross-linguistic perspective, for example, the comparison of English-Chinese thematic progression patterns conducted in this study, grasping the features peculiar to economic discourse, is also of great practical value for learning and translating economic texts.
For further research on the thematic progression, we suggest areas for further efforts: Firstly, the theoretical construction based on linguistic universals and language-particular features should be further strengthened, and the use of corpus techniques should be explored, and the practical use of theoretical research should be focused on. For example, in the context of Chinese linguistics, for the "imported" nature of the thematic progression theory, it is mainly conducted by the scholars of foreign language studies and the attention to Chinese language facts is far from enough. Our contribution to world linguistic theory is not only to verify or apply a foreign theory, but also to propose and improve it, which must be based on the facts of our native language and combined with a broad cross-linguistic perspective, so future research should strengthen the analysis of the Chinese corpus.
Secondly, interdisciplinary cooperation should be further strengthened to expand research areas and promote the development of artificial intelligence and other construction. In the field of linguistics and literature disciplines, as Figure 1, Figure 2 and Table 1, future related research should continue to focus on linguistics and further strengthen the work more closely related to brain science, such as the acquisition and processing of native and foreign languages. In addition, in the area of interdisciplinary research, also as our literature analysis shows, current research is still largely confined to the areas of language and literature, with a smaller proportion of research findings in law, philosophy, psychology, and computer science. In terms of interdisciplinary research and artificial intelligence, there should be more research in these fields. Also when more scholars specializing computer science and artificial intelligence enter into the field of research, more techniques of data analysis motivated by automated processing of language can invigorate the research in this field swiftly. Some work of great value has been witnessed in these studies, such as Firbas (1971), Pala and Svoboda (2014), Xi et al. (2017Xi et al. ( , 2019, Ge and Kong (2020).