| News commentary is the published voice on the latest events by people around the world. It is featured by strong persuasiveness. In order to convince the audience, writers always adopt different ways. Metadiscourse focuses our attention on the ways how writers organize the contents, project themselves into their work and engage the readers. It not only helps writers express their attitudes and stances, but also direct the audience to have a better understanding of the discourse.Metadiscourse is always represented in discourse by metadiscourse markers. In this thesis, based on the chosen corpora, the writer adopts Dafouz's classification system of metadiscourse with small revisions. Metadiscourse consists of two parts: textual metadiscourse markers and interpersonal metadiscourse markers. The former refers to logical markers, sequencers, endophorics, topicalisers, and code glosses while the latter means hedges, certainty markers, attributors, attitude markers and commentary.The news commentaries selected for the present study come from two official websites, one is http://www.pulitzer.org/ and the other is http://www.xinhuanet.com/zgjx/. The thesis mainly addresses four problems: (1) what are the features of Chinese and English news commentaries in the employment of metadiscourse? (3)What are the similarities and differences between the Chinese and English news commentaries in the employment of metadiscourse? (4)Why do those similarities and differences exist?The result shows: (1) the employment of interpersonal metadiscourse markers are more than that of textual metadiscourse markers both in Chinese and English news commentary;(2) Within textual metadiscourse markers, logical markers and code glosses are the highest frequently used; within interpersonal metadiscourse markers, commentary and attitude markers are the highest frequently used;(3) there are some differences in the employment in both corpora and they are caused by several reasons. The thesis hopes to improve people's understanding about metadiscourse and strengthen their abilities in using them so as to enhance their writing level in news commentary. |
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