Comparative Studies Of Apple Daily’s News Headlines In Taiwan Version With That In Hong Kong Version From The Linguistic Perspectives

The uses of the same language is often affected by the local social environments where the language is spoken. This thesis attempted to study certain aspects of the social environmental effects on the Chinese language from the analysis of the news headlines in two Chinese-speaking regions, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The studies were conducted based on the news headlines collected from a popular newspaper, "Apple Daily", published in both regions. We chose the word count as the main measurement to analyze the level of brevity of the news headlines of the same stories in different regional editions of "Apple Daily", because the number of words is an important characteristic of the Chinese language. The reason that the "Apple. Daily" was chosen is that it has large readership in both the regions. The data samples were gathered from the time ranging from July 2011 to February 2012. Totally, there were 969 pairs of raw different headlines collected, and the word counts of these raw headlines were collected. These word count data were examined and analyzed statistically from a number of perspectives.As shown in the statistical data, the Taiwan media are generally using more concise languages than their Hong Kong counterparts. Based on this statistical analysis results, we found a number of possible social and environmental factors that might have affected the different language uses in the two regions. Among these factors, we found that two factors are more prominent:namely, the degree of explicit details in the headlines and the amount of rhetoric structures uses. The first factor is the main reason that the Hong Kong media tends to have longer headlines, which includes explicit reference to locations, foreign phrases and quotations. The second factor attributes to the brevity of Taiwan media headlines, which especially emphasize the uses of four-character idioms and the uses of elegant and rhetoric words. We also attempted to give some social and cultural explanation to this linguistic phenomena observed in our studies, and hope that we can shed some lights for future studies in these areas.