Abstract: Translation studies doctoral dissertations reflect the main trend of translation studies in China. A study of their use of theories can reveal the theoretical development by Chinese translation scholars. An analysis of 61 doctoral dissertations of translation studies adopting linguistic approaches during 2004—2023 shows that the most widely used theories are from cognitive linguistics, systemic functional linguistics, psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, text linguistics and sociolinguistics. Theories that provide unique perspectives and refined classifications are more favored by doctoral students. These linguistic theories are used for explaining the translating process, describing the translation products, and constructing new translation theories, with more than half of the dissertations using theories for the first purpose. Linguistic theories are used either as tools for analyzing translation texts, or as tools for explaining translation phenomena, resulting in four types of theory use: frame borrowing, frame fusion, single-dimension explaining and multi-dimension explaining, among which frame borrowing and frame fusion are the most common.