Information Structure of Thai and English Representation of Ideas in Newspaper Articles

Abstract

An individual lexical item serves many functions in texts and one possible function either within a sentence or a longer text is to create links within a sentence or a text. Creation of links between ideas in a sentence makes possible the formation of certain structures in longer texts. Such links of lexical items or lexical groups are considered interlocking parts within one sentence which exhibit information. As important as they might be, certain lexical groups are tools for writers to represent their thoughts in such a systematic way that readers can understand the flow of the information. Information structure, in fact, is a mental representation of ideas and thoughts of a writer in organising information into certain kinds of structures. It is possible to assert that meaning may probably be similar between two languages but each language may have different structures of information representing the same thing. No matter how two different information structures are identical or different, they could be traced back to the same original idea. The main purpose of this study, therefore, is to highlight similarities and differences of information structures between Thai and English in exhibiting identical representation of thoughts which may juxtapose different aspects presenting information. Theme-Rheme construction, given rise to the attention of how writers develop their topic focus in a text starting from Theme of one sentence to Theme in another sentence, is adopted as a framework of this study to examine how information is presented in Thai and English newspaper articles. Four newspaper articles, one Thai newspaper article and its English translation and one English newspaper and its Thai translation, were used to investigate how information is developed in longer texts. The results yield that certain information structures are different with their translated counterpart but some exhibit the same pattern of development.