A Contrastive Study Of The Problem-solution Pattern In Chinese And English Hard News Texts

The Problem-Solution pattern (P-S pattern) has been explored by manyresearchers. Winter studied the general pattern from the perspective of clauserelations. Hoey then put forward the minimum discourse pattern and claimed that thepattern can be adopted for text analysis in different genres. McCarthy summarizedsome typical words of each element in the P-S pattern. Hard news as a particulargenre has been investigated from various perspectives. This paper conducts acontrastive study of the Problem-Solution pattern in Chinese and English hard newsfrom the macro and micro perspectives aiming to find out the similarities anddifferences between Chinese and English hard news in the P-S pattern realization.Thirty Chinese hard news samples and thirty English hard news samples withthe major topic as natural disasters reported in2011and2012are collected fromauthoritative newspapers home and abroad. This paper examines the generalstructure of hard news from the macro perspective to illustrate the differences andsimilarities in the realization of the P-S pattern and the micro analysis attempts tofind out the differences and similarities in the application of vocabulary of eachelement, clause relations and explicit signaling words of clause relations.Findings suggest that from the macro perspective, the Problem element is highlyobligatory and the structure Problem–Response is the most frequently used patternfor both Chinese and English hard news. However, compared with Chinese hardnews, direct speech and the writing structure Problem–Response–Problem aremore prevalently employed in English hard news. From the micro perspective,generally speaking, time-sequence relation, cause-consequence relation and contrastrelation play a very important role in Chinese and English hard news construction,among which time-sequence relation is applied the most frequently. However, inEnglish hard news there is no signal for instrument-achievement relation andcontrast relation is more frequently used than cause-consequence relation in Englishhard news but for Chinese hard news the case is the opposite. The findingscomplement the study of the P-S pattern, providing more information about thepattern.