ABSTRACT
Halliday holds that there is a marked theme and an unmarked one from the perspective of functional linguistics. The marked theme is not consistent with the subject of the sentence; instead it is the beginning of the topic. In this study, we have modified Davies framework for a marked theme with contextual functions. Then the collected data from both Chinese magazines and EI index papers were counted sentence by sentence to calculate the proportion of contextual function (CF) marked themes. We compared and contrasted the percentages of CF marked themes, from the abstract to conclusion section, involved in both Chinese papers and English papers. Data analysis shows that the frequency of the marked theme differs from section to section both in Chinese and English papers; and the CF marked theme is more frequently applied in Chinese papers for its linguistic features, which will guide our academic paper writing.
