A Cross-cultural Discourse Study Of Chinese And American News Reports On Smog

These years, “smog” is gradually becoming a common and hot topic of Chinese people’s daily talks because inhabitants in Beijing, Shanghai and other big populous cities have been plagued by it from time to time. Therefore, “smog” news often hits front pages of press at home and abroad. Since “smog,” as a relatively new phenomenon in China, manages to catch people’s attention only in these several years, few studies have been done about it.This thesis aims to take sixty pieces of “smog” news as the object of study, among which 30 pieces are written by Chinese Xinhua news agency and the other 30 pieces are written by American news agencies. The author provides an insight into news from two perspectives: move and stance, with the purpose of working out cognitive frames respectively reflected in the two kinds of corpus. The contrastive analysis of move and information elements is based on Bunton’s model(2002) and Van Dijk’s news schema(1988). The discourse stance taking inherent in “smog” news written in the two countries is revealed by referring to Biber(1999) and Berman’s(2000) stance marker categorization. Quantitative and qualitative methods are both adopted.It is found that in Chinese-written smog news, more officials’ comments are quoted and more prominence given to governmental efforts and measures being taken and to be taken, so that in terms of institutional stance, the Chinese news is largely dominated by government stance. While In American-written smog news, negative tone is prevalent. Reporters are eager to deliver personal or quoted comments towards “smog,” in which abound concerns and their dictations as to what steps should further be taken to alleviate environmental pollution. In such a way, American media show a press stance driven by national interest and stereotypes. At last, two theoretical frameworks about how both countries report Chinese affairs are concluded, which may serve as guidance for cross-cultural communication and cognitive education, and also as an example and reference for China’s foreign publicity.