A Contrastive Analysis Of Business News Discourses In Chinese And British Newspapers And Magazines

This thesis strives to conduct a contrastive analysis of the business news discourse as a sub-variety of news discourses from the perspective of Halliday's systemic-functional grammar.With Halliday's systemic-functional grammar as its theoretical support, the study will summarize their specific 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 business news discourses, five in English and five in Chinese. All of the ten business news discourses are from the newspapers and journals which share the readership and circulation in large quantities in the whole world, such as The Economist, The Financial Times and The People's Daily. All of these newspapers and journals can reflect the popular 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 and quantitative analysis, and then concludes the contrastive results about English and Chinese newspapers from ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. The findings of the study are summarized as follows:From the aspect of ideational function, the Chinese and the British business news report discourses have great similarities in the distribution of process types, which can be attributed to the characteristics of the genre of business news report. There are large proportions of material and relational processes in both the Chinese and the British sample discourses. In the way of voice selection, though business news discourses, either in English or in Chinese, mainly select active voice, the proportion of passive voice in English discourses is bigger than that in Chinese discourses, which boils down to the different expressing habits between English and Chinese.From the aspect of interpersonal function, the contrastive study shows that whether in English or Chinese business news discourses, past tense and present tense have a large proportion while future tense has low frequency of appearance. Modal verbs in English and Chinese discourses have the same frequency. From the aspect of textual function, the contrastive study shows that whether in English or Chinese business news discourses, the word order of most sentences is formal, belonging to unmarked theme, which meets the need of providing information. But a certain number of marked themes are necessary, which add the sense of rhyme and coherence between sentences.The writer hopes that the above findings will provide insights into the field of contrastive analysis. It is also hoped that the findings will be helpful for business news discourse writing and translation.