A Contrastive Discourse Analysis Of The Chinese And English Editorial Commentaries On Natural Disasters

This thesis makes an attempt at applying theories and methodologies of intercultural contrastive discourse analysis (ICDA) to the Chinese and English editorial commentaries on natural disasters (ND). Special attention is paid to the influence of sociocultural context on the production of editorial discourse, especially on the frames, disaster coverage, and editorial functions.ICDA is an interdisciplinary field of study that emerged in the 1990s. Though still at its beginning stage, ICDA has drawn more and more academic attention from linguistics, sociology and communication studies. It takes a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic perspective in the study of discourse, and lays special emphasis on the influence of social and cultural context on language and discourse. This thesis tries to make such an analysis in a new area—the editorial commentary, which is a formal style of written discourse, not well explored by domestic scholars. In order to narrow down the scope of data, the topic of"natural disasters"is chosen, which is among the hottest issues in both Chinese and English media discourses.Two of the most influential national newspapers in China and the US, the People's Daily and the New York Times were selected as the data sources. Then 291 editorial commentaries on 15 sub-topics of natural disasters were collected from the two newspapers over an 8-year span (1998-2005). Next, 36 samples were selected randomly but based on the principle of matching title focuses to form a comparable corpus for detailed analysis.Theories from functional linguistics, critical linguistics and communication studies are adopted in this study. A combined approach of functional, critical discourse analysis and frame analysis is applied to these samples. Various aspects of the Chinese and English editorial commentaries on ND, including frequency, title focus, length, disaster coverage, frames and functions are analyzed. Though many similarities are identified, a number of differences are also found out. The major findings are as follows:(1) The frequencies of both the Chinese and English editorial commentaries are...