A Contrastive Analysis Of Political News Discourse In American And Chinese Newspapers

The studies on contrastive discourse analysis began in the early 1950s and have ahistory of 50 years. It is generally believed that most of the studies are from thelexical, syntactical and rhetorical perspectives. Besides, some other studies focus theirresearches on the components of different kinds of discourse genres. With regard tothe genres of contrastive discourse analysis, the former studies are mostly limited inthe literal field, while other communicative discourses of commonality media, such aspolitical news discourse, are rarely referred to. Therefore, hoping to pave a new wayand based on the former studies, this study intends to have a contrastive analysis onthe political news discourse in American and Chinese newspapers. With Halliday'ssystemic-functional grammar as its theoretical support, the study will summarize theirspecific linguistic characteristics from three perspectives of ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function.To ensure the validity and reliability of this thesis, the writer collected ten politicalnews discourses which have been published since 1990, among which five in Englishand five in Chinese. All of the ten political news discourses are from the newspapersand journals which share the readership and circulation in large quantities in thewhole world, such as USA Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post, PeopleDaily, and Guangming Ribao, etc. All of these newspapers and journals can reflect thepopular language of English and Chinese in the modern society.Therefore, based on Halliday's theory of three metafunctions and context theory,this thesis adopts the study methods of descriptive analysis, qualitative analysis andquantitative analysis, and then concludes the contrastive results about English andChinese newspapers from ideational function, interpersonal function and textualfunction. The findings of the study summarized as the follows:From the aspect of its ideational function, the contrastive study shows that in theway of transitivity process selection, political news discourse in English and Chineseboth concentrate on material process, assistant with verbal process and relationalprocess while mental process and behavioral process are rarely involved. Thischaracteristic is decided by field and mode of political news;in the way of voiceselection, though political news discourses, either in English or Chinese, are mainlyon active voice, passive voice in English discourses proportion more than in Chinesediscourses, which boils down to the different expressing habits between Americansand Chinese.From the aspect of its interpersonal function, the contrastive study shows thatwhether in English or Chinese political news discourses, past tense and present tensehave large proportion while future tense has low frequency of appearance which onlyappears in officials' development forecast on some political event. Modality verbs inEnglish discourses have the same appearance frequency in Chinese ones.From the aspect of its textual function, the contrastive study shows that whether inEnglish or Chinese political news discourses, the word order of most sentences isformal, belonging to unmarked theme, which meets the need of providing information.But definite majority of marked theme is necessary, which adds the sense of rhymeand attraction and the coherence between sentences. But there exists clear differenceon the mode of thematic progression between English discourses and Chinese ones.English discourses generally adopt linear thematic progression while Chinese onesoften adopt the same theme thematic progression, which is decided specially by theAmerican's linear thought pattern and Chinese people's spiral thought pattern.The writer hopes that the above findings will provide insights into the field ofcontrastive analysis. It is also hoped that the findings will be helpful for political newsdiscourse writing and translation.