| A complete discourse makes up of two major elements: primary discourse andmetadiscourse. Metdiscourse is the cover term for the self-reflective expressionswhich is used to negotiate interactional meanings in a text, assisting the writer (orspeaker) to express a viewpoint and engage with readers as members of a particularcommunity. In recent years, the metadiscourse studies have attracted many scholars’interest both from home and abroad. The oversea scholars have done comprehensivestudies on metadiscourse, which including both theoretical and empirical ones. Theseresearches mainly concerned with how native writers or speakers of English usemetadiscourse. The Chinese scholars also have great interest in the metadiscourse,they mainly focus on the empirical study, which including the students’ academicwriting and dissertations. However, little work has been done on contrastive analysisof the use of metdiscourse items between Chinese and English disaster news.This thesis takes the Hyland’s interpersonal model of metadiscourse as thetheoretical framework, which consists of two major categories (interactive resourcesand interactional resources) and ten subcategories (transitions, frame markers,endophoric markers, evidentials and code glosses, hedges, boosters, attitude markers,self-mentions and engagement markers). Based on the contrastive analysis ofmetadiscourse use, we will take30disaster news as the data, with15Chinese and15English. The current study compares the similarities and differences in metadiscourseuse between Chinese and English disaster news reporters. Therefore, this studyaddresses four questions.(1) How do Chinese and English writers use themetadiscourse devices in the disaster news?(2) Are there any similarities anddifferences on the applications of metadiscourse in two languages?(3) What might bethe possible causes of these similarities and differences?(4) What are the features ofusing metadiscourse in Chinese and English disaster news? To answer the above questions, the author takes three steps in the corpus analysis:first, carefully cod the metadiscourse devices in the texts; second, the occurrences ofeach metadiscourse devices are counted in Chinese and English disaster newsrespectively; third, the corpora are processed by calculating the gross totals of themetadiscourse devices. And finally, the statistical results are presented.Statistical findings show that both Chinese and English disaster news use moreinteractive resources than interactional resources; transitions, evidentials, hedges,boosters and frame markers are among the tope five metadiscoure items; endophoricmarkers are seldom used in the two groups of corpora. However, there also existdifferences in the use of metadiscourse items in two groups of corpora. The Englishnews reporters used considerably more (nearly twice) metadiscourse devices than theChinese news reporters. Although the evidentials and transitions are both the most twofrequently used categories; in Chinese corpus, evidentials takes the first place andtransitions takes the second place, while in English corpus, transitions takes the firstplace and evidentials takes the second place. Self-mentions are used in low frequencyin English corpus, while in Chinese corpus; the self-mentions are not used at all.With such similarities and differences is concerned, this thesis argues that thepossible causes might be genre, culture and writer’s news perspective aspects. Thevalue of the study contains three parts: first, it offers us a new perspective from themetadiscourse use to read the disaster news; second, it offers the metadisocurseresearchers, especially those working on contrastive analysis between two languagesand news reporters more relative materials and data for their study; third, althoughobjectivity is the key point of news reports, the study finds that it is the writer whodecides what to report and what not, and how to report when conveying theinformation which involves the genre, the writer’s culture background and newsperspective. At the end of the dissertation, limitations and suggestions for the futurestudy are presented. |
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