Contrastive Study On Syntactic Features In English Editorials Between China Daily And The Guardian Weekly

Newspaper provides people with information all over the world in modern era. Reading English newspaper has admittedly become a good way of learning language as well as knowing the outside. Editorial is regarded as the soul of news media and has attracted much attention since the rising of the genre of commentary. Writings or researches on news commentary especially editorials have become the hotspot. However, many English learners are often confronted with problems like this: besides similarities, there are still significant syntactic differences in English editorials between those issued in China and those in English-native countries. So, what are the distinctive syntactic features of English editorial and where do the differences exist?Based on traditional grammar and contrastive linguistics, the thesis selected samples from two kinds of leading newspapers---China Daily and The Guardian Weekly to find the syntactic similarities and differences on English editorial between them. Reasons were also explained to draw conclusions. From the comparison result, the author finds that there do exist some similarities as well as differences in various aspects between the two.China Daily prefers to use shorter sentence. This just corresponds with the fact that simple sentences frequently occur in it. China Daily are also fond of shorter paragraphs especially many one-sentence paragraphs which will be easier for readers to get the main idea of the text. The big difference between them is that complicated sentences frequently occur in The Guardian Weekly. Generally, they share the similar using percentage of subjective clause, predicative clause, and adverbial clause while objective clauses in The Guardian Weekly are far more than those in China Daily. Then, after deeper analysis, the author finds that China Daily uses adverbial clause singularly while The Guardian Weekly uses it more extensively. China Daily prefers to use noun phrases with pre-modifier while The Guardian Weekly prefers noun phrases with post-modifier or both pre & post-modifier. In addition, the usage of specific sentence structures in these two kinds of are different as well.Through the comparison between China Daily and The Guardian Weekly, the author aims to discover the similarities and differences between English editorials published in local and English native countries. Hopefully this paper can provide some useful reading and writing rules or techniques for English learners and one reference to improve their English competence with news materials. Moreover, this study can more or less be of some help to professional journalists.