Analysis of the Thematic Progression Patterns in English News Discourse

The theory of theme and rheme and the patterns of thematic progression are not only two important parts of the systemic functional grammar but also an important means of discourse analysis. With thematic structure theory and patterns of thematic progression as the theoretical support, this research makes a combination of theoretical research and discourse analysis. This paper aims to find out the application and characteristics of the theme and rheme structure in English news discourse. After choosing the data from BBC (website:https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51403795) reporting on 7th February 2020 with the title of Li Wenliang: Coronavirus Kills Chinese Whistleblower Doctor and giving a detailed analysis by empirical study. Through the analysis of the relationship between theme and rheme in the full text, we find that this text does not only apply a certain thematic progression pattern, but also applies more than one thematic progression pattern. Therefore, we come to the conclusion that thematic progression does exist in this news discourse and shows obvious characteristics and distribution. And also, parallel pattern and continuation pattern are frequently presented in this news discourse.