A Contrastive Study On Clause Relations Of English And Chinese News Discourse

In functional grammar,the clause complex is a unit above the clause and formed by two or more clauses in a way of logical relation.The clause complex is the highest rank of English grammar and realized by the logical function from the ideational metafunction,embodied by the logico-semantic relation of expanding or projecting.There are two aspects which need to be analyzed in the clause complexes: One is the logical dependency relation,which determines whether the clauses are hypotaxis or parataxis to each other;the other is logico-semantic relation,in which one clause is expanded or projected by another.This thesis is a contrastive study of English and Chinese news discourse from the perspective of clause relations,and proposes the following study questions:(1)What are the major similarities and differences in the distributions and occurrence of the clause relations between English and Chinese news discourse?(2)What are the major similarities and differences in the principal markers of the clause relations of English and Chinese news discourse?This adopts quantitative and qualitative study methods,as well as the comparative method to discover the clause relations under the clause theory of Halliday.This thesis extends the following conclusions:(1)In terms of the logical dependency relation,the combination of hypotaxis relation and parataxis relation is the most common pattern occurred in both English and Chinese news discourse.However,the distribution of parataxis and hypotaxis is different.In terms of the logico-semantic relation,all the subcategories of the expanding relation and projecting relation can be identified,but with different frequency.In English news discourse,enhancing is the most frequently occurred expanding relation,while in Chinese,extending is the most frequently occurred relation in the way of expanding.(2)There are certain markers to indicate different clause relations in both English and Chinese news discourse.In terms of logical dependency relation,all the hypotaxis relations in both English and Chinese are realized in markers.However,in terms of parataxis,there are some differences.In English,more than 60.67% of parataxis with explicit markers are employed,while in Chinese,only 10.84 % of the parataxis is marked,most of them remain unmarked.The thesis further analyzes the reasons for the discovered differences.First,English and Chinese are different in terms of syntax.English is a language of“Subject-Object”,and it emphasizes on the language form.While Chinese is a language of “Topic-Comment”,and the meaning is its first concern.Moreover,when it comes to the philosophy of language,analysis the major thinking model of Western people,while integration is the essential thinking model of Eastern people.These reasons from the two aspects are the fundamental reasons for the differences of clause relations between English and Chinese news discourse.Theoretically,this thesis proved the practicability of using the clause relation theory of Halliday to analyze Chinese.Meanwhile,the study also provides the evidence to the theory of “Chinese is paratactic while English is hypotactic” in details from the perspective of clause relations.In application,the thesis is able to give insight into news writing and translation.