Abstract

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.

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