A Comparative Study Of Language Reports In Both English And Chinese Political News In Light Of Adaptation Theory

Language report, as a universal and important linguistic phenomenon, has attracted scholars’ attention at home and abroad. News, as an essential means of spreading information, focuses on not only the news event itself, but also what people have said in or about the event. Thus, language reports can be found widely employed in news reports. Furthermore, people can not separate from politics and it influences our society in every regard. Therefore, studies on language reports in political news discourse are very significant. However, previous scholars have seldom been concerned about the comparative analysis of language reports in English political news discourse(EPND) and Chinese political news discourse(CPND) in light of Verschueren’s adaptation theory. Therefore, this present study mainly investigates the differences and the similarities between language reports in EPND and those in CPND within the framework of Verschueren’s adaptation theory, in hope of providing some implications for English teaching and learning as well as cross-cultural communication and so forth.The study built two paralleled corpora, each consisting of 50 political news discourses. Quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted to analyze the differences and the similarities between language reports of EPND and those of CPND as well as the pragmatic interpretation of language reports in both languages.And language report in EPND occurs more frequently than that in CPND. Besides,indirect speech, neutral reporting verbs and official news sources are most favored in both EPND and CPND. However, Mixed Speech and media news sources are more frequently used in CPND than in EPND. And there exist obvious cultural differences between language report in EPND and that in CPND. In a word, the existence of language reports in EPND and CPND is analyzed and expounded, which proves that the language choices for language reports in political news reflect the adaptation to the mental world, social world and physical world of respective languages.