A Comparative Study Of Coherence In English And Chinese Editorial Discourses

This thesis is intended to provoke researchers' interest to rethink the concept of coherence in discourse analysis and to improve and complete the theory of coherence. The focuses of the research are upon what similarities and dissimilarities exist among the editorials from representative national quality newspapers in America, Britain and China and upon how socio-cultural factors exert influence on the organization of editorial discourse as implicit devices of constructing coherence. In this thesis, a study of coherence in English and Chinese editorials is conducted through comparative approach as the framework and with coherence theory and Rhetorical Structure Theory as theoretical foundation.In the contemporary world exchanges among countries have extended from the initial fields of trade and commerce to other spheres such as thoughts and ideas. Language becomes the golden key of successful communication for people coming from different families of the global village. No wonder the mass fever of learning Chinese around the world or the popular trend of learning English in non-English speaking countries come into being. However, obstacles still exist in the international communication in which English is utilized as the international language. As for my personal experiences of reading editorials, I usually suffer confusion and uncertainty of opinions put forward by the editorial writers even though I know each word of the article. These unhappy experiences drive me to probe into the non-linguistic factors affecting interpretation of discourse. This is why we single out editorial discourse as the object of the study in this dissertation.In the researches on discourse analysis, various approaches to the study of discourse fall into four categories according to different orientations: philosophical orientation, sociological orientation, psychological orientation and linguistic orientation. Textual cohesion is one of the subjects on which linguistic-oriented approaches to discourse analysis focus. By surveying the subjects of studies of discourse analysis in China we find that Chinese researchers of discourse analysis have transferred their attention todiscussing theoretical issues and attempting to apply discourse analysis to case study of specific genres. As a popular genre of discourse in social life, news reporting has always been analyzed from different angles in different academic fields. In the field of discourse analysis, news reporting is often analyzed by critical approach, that is, critical discourse analysis. In fact, sharp criticism of CDA has been around for a long time. For instance, CDA's methods of data collection and text analysis are inexplicit, and the data are often restricted to text fragments. Since CDA is not so perfect for discourse analysis of news reporting, it is also not efficient for the study of editorial discourse. In order to find a proper angle, the studies of editorials abroad and at home are collected and examined. The impact of editorials on the publics, the ideology of editorials and the problems of editorials nowadays are the major topics in the research on editorials which have been done abroad. Researches on editorials in China generally discuss argumentation techniques in editorials writing, or explore stylistic features of editorials, or make contrastive studies of Chinese and American newspaper editorials, or interpret the hidden ideology and power of editorials through critical discourse analysis. By looking back on the studies of editorial discourse, we realize that studies of editorials have covered many aspects including stylistic features, ideology and power, writing techniques and social effects of editorials. Nonetheless, discourse structure and discourse organization of editorials have been seldom touched upon.Referring to the organization of discourse components into a whole, we cannot do it without the notions "coherence" and "cohesion". When we evaluate organization of a discourse, we often take coherence as the basic standard. As we look through the achievements of previous study, we can detect that most studies focus on examining whether explicit cohesive ties can guarantee coherence and discussing the classification of explicit cohesive ties in discourse in general. Apparently, few researches as to how coherence is constructed by implicit cohesive ties in specific genre of discourse have been done. The thesis aims at exploring how coherence is built up in English and Chinese newspaper editorials on the basis of similarities and dissimilarities English and Chinese newspaper editorials have in the respect of discourse organization and how the hidden factors influence coherence construction. Unlike previous studies on coherence and cohesion of discourse, this thesis does research based on RST which is able to give an account of textual coherence through depicting an overall picture of relations holdingbetween all the parts of discourse.Through a comparative analysis of newspaper editorials from English and Chinese newspapers, we find dissimilarities between English and Chinese editorials. The overall top-level rhetorical structure of English editorial differs from that of the Chinese editorial. English editorials have more elaboration relation and concession relation than Chinese editorials while Chinese editorials have more evaluation relation and joint relation than English editorials. It seems that the variation in rhetorical conventions of English and Chinese causes distinct choices of rhetorical structures and rhetorical relations. But how do we explain the following findings about similarities among them: In all the editorials written in English or Chinese justify relation appears at the similar frequency. The editorials from The New York Times and The People's Daily both employ list (or joint) relation. The editorial from The Times uses justify relation which resembles evidence relation in the aspect of intended effect, and the editorial from The People's Daily uses evidence relation. Thus, it is not convincing enough to attribute the variation of rhetorical structure and rhetorical relations use among editorials of American, British and Chinese newspapers to variation in linguistic aspects. Non-linguistic factors such as social-cultural factors should be taken into account too.The general functions of editorials are to present opinion and persuade readers to agree with the opinion of editorials. Therefore, it is possible to interpret the high use frequency of justify relation whose intended effect is to increase readers' readiness to accept writer's right to express some opinion in all the editorials written in English or in Chinese. However, the specific functions of newspaper editorials in different countries are not quite the same. The editorial is always regarded as "the banner" in China while in America it is committed to establish a forum or an open place for free speech and exchange of ideas. Consequently, elaboration relation becomes the most frequently used relation in English editorials of American newspaper because of their emphasis on elaborating on its opinion and persuading readers to accept it. Moreover, evaluation relation and joint relation are used most frequently in Chinese editorials because they attach great importance to the repeated statements of official position and evaluation of the standpoint. The use of list or joint relation in American and Chinese newspaper editorials which make comments on London underground bombing is reasonable in that these relations help writer to enumerate sensational facts to show his emotionsdeliberately. Justify relation in the British newspaper editorial and evidence relation in the Chinese newspaper editorial are used to make the verification of opinion reliable and convincing.Comparative study of coherence in Chinese, American and British newspaper editorials has shown that rhetorical variation in discourse has been demonstrated to extend beyond the global "direct/indirect" classification and has suggested support for the hypothesis that discourse construction of a text is, to a large extent, determined not barely by the language in which it is actually written, but by the particular social and cultural context in which the text is produced and used.