| The present thesis makes a comparative study of the use of discourse markers inthe ‘opinion' sections in New York Times and Global Times. It aims to find out theirsimilarities as well as differences and then to provide an account of the underlyingreasons. This contrastive analysis can serve to further our understanding of discoursemarkers in a specific genre like this and to demonstrate that the functional analyticalframework developed in the present study supplies a flexible platform on whichcomparisons of other types of written discourse in the use of DMs may also beinspired.Based on Halliday's (1994) three meta-functions of language, the author dividesdiscourse markers into two types: textual discourse markers and interpersonaldiscourse markers. In the light of Hyland's taxonomy of textual and interpersonalmetadiscourse (1998), Hyland and Tse's taxonomy of interactive and interactionalmetadiscourse (2004) and Fraser's classification of DMs (1996), the author putsforward her own analytical framework for the present comparison, further dividingboth textual and interpersonal discourse markers into four subcategories respectively.The data for the present study are collected from two elite newspapers, NewYork Times and Global Times, which consist of60articles altogether from theopinion columns, with30written in English and30in Chinese. In order to guaranteethe comparability, the chosen articles are of similar topics and similar length.Through the quantitative analysis, it has been found that the English articles usemore discourse markers than the Chinese articles. Moreover, textual discoursemarkers and interpersonal discourse markers are also found to be more frequentlyused in the English data. Within textual discourse markers, there are also similaritiesand differences in the two newspapers. First, logical markers abound in both data.However, the English data prefer the use of contrastive markers while the Chinesedata favor the use of elaborative markers. Second, evidentials are the second mostfrequent marker in both data. Meanwhile, indirect evidentials are found to dominate in both data. Third, both frame markers and code glosses display low frequencies ofoccurrence in both data. In the case of interpersonal discourse markers, the similaritiesand differences are as follows. Firstly, hedges stand out as the most frequentsubcategory in both data. Secondly, the Chinese and the English data show a similarnumber of attitude markers. Thirdly, as for communicative markers, Chinese writerstend to use the first person plural pronouns while English writers opt for both the firstperson plural pronouns and the second person plural pronouns.The possible reasons for the similarities and differences in the use of DMsbetween the two newspapers are mainly explored from three perspectives:communicative, linguistic, and cultural. First of all, the common communicativepurpose of the ‘opinion' columns in newspapers explains the dominating use ofhedges and indirect evidential, because newspapers are intended for a large readership.Then, the differences between Chinese culture and English culture account for the factthat the Chinese ‘opinion' articles are characterized by elaborative logical markerswhile their English counterparts are characteristic of contrastive logical markers, aswell as for the fact that the Chinese writers prefer to use the first person pluralpronouns, since collectivism is highly valued in China. Lastly, the linguisticdifferences between Chinese and English (It is argued that English is a morehypotactic and writer-responsible language while Chinese a more paratactic andreader-responsible language) interpret why there are more textual discourse markers,especially logical markers, and interpersonal discourse markers used in the Englisharticles. |
PDF Full Text Request