Genre Analysis Of Chinese And English Political News Reports

The genre analysis of political news discourse accounts for a large part in genre analysis. This paper is going to research the political news discourse with the same subject in one filed with the purpose of figuring out the macro move-structure, discovering the textual characteristics, and exploring the possible reasons for the differences on the micro level.In order to limit the data to one field with the same subject, the relative objectivity and common participation of the political issue should be considered. It should not just involve the profits of certain region or field, but the whole world and all human beings. Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in 2009 is a global climate conference, covering everywhere on the earth, every field, and even the survival of mankind, so it definitely carries its distinct political nature. The data of the paper is from this conference, and the samples are selected from the political news discourse from《人民日报》, China Daily and New York Times.Bhatia's seven-step analysis model is adopted as the genre analysis theory in this paper. First, the macro-structure of the selected political news discourse samples is analyzed with his theory, which includes six moves in total. They are: presenting the event, detailing the event, reaching the conclusion, recommending action, background information and relevant case. On the micro level, four moves----presenting the event, detailing the event, background information and relevant case, are analyzed, with the move of detailing the event as the main one. The steps of expressing the positions of China and US and the steps of newspaper's comment in the second move are analyzed in terms of grammatical device, lexical cohesion and logical connector, and from the analysis in lexical cohesion, the lexical chain which expresses the positions of China and US is extracted. Besides, the steps of expressing the positions of China and US are analyzed again from another angle----the realization of information focus. The finding shows that when selecting in what way to realize information focus, China Daily manifests the similar characteristics of《人民日报》. At last, this paper tries to explore the possible reasons for the differences from three different angels----'hypotactic vs. paratactic','stative vs. dynamic'and'first language transfer'The findings of this paper can help the reporters, especially English news reporters with Chinese as the first language, have a much clearer picture of the macrostructure of the political news discourse, and the different processing ways on the micro level. And they also have practical significance in the teaching of news reports reading and writing.