| Disasters are usually emergent and destructive events which bring great sufferings to human being and cause significant losses to their properties.When a disaster event happens,the first important thing should be providing timely and effective news reports to the public;inefficient news reports may deteriorate the situation.Facts have shown that Western and Chinese media differ from each other in the style and efficiency of disaster news reporting,and as far as I'm concerned,Chinese disaster news reports are far away from being satisfactory.Under such practical circumstance,the present study intends to conduct a contrastive analysis of English and Chinese disaster news discourses on the basis of Rhetorical Structure Theory,attempting to find out their differences as well as similarities and provide possible suggestions from the perspective of discourse analysis.The paper adopts both qualitative and quantitative methods to answer the research questions,which are about the differences and similarities of the type,frequency and distribution of rhetorical relations,RST diagram patterns and internal structures between English and Chinese disaster news discourses,as well as the reporting style and structural features revealed.The qualitative analysis is demonstrated by the detailed RST analytical procedures,and the quantitative analysis refers to the statistical analysis of the initial data obtained from the previous process.The RST analytical procedures are conducted with the assistance of RST Tool 345 and the statistics are testified by the tool SPSS Statistics 19.Although the data tests by Wilcoxon Matched-pairs Signed-ranked Test and Mann-Whitney U Test show no significant differences in the types,frequency and distribution of rhetorical relations,the five universal RST diagram patterns,or the frequency and preference for subordinate structures and coordinate structures in English and Chinese disaster news discourses,the paper finds out that in terms of rhetorical relations,Chinese disaster news discourses apply more types of and a higher total number of rhetorical relations than English discourses;Certain relations such as Elaboration,Background,Circumstance appear more frequently in both English and Chinese discourses than the others like due to the requirement of the news genre;English disaster news discourses prefer Elaboration and Antithesis much more than Chinese discourses while Chinese disaster news discourses have quite much preference for Purpose and Circumstance;the two kinds of discourses share a lot in the dominant relations,with the top four both are Elaboration,Conjunction,Joint and Volitional Result relations.In terms of RST diagram patterns,90%of the English discourses are constructed under Pattern A,B and D,while a same proportion of the Chinese discourses are constructed under Pattern A,B and C;Chinese discourses has remarkably higher preference for Pattern C than English discourses,and more English discourses are constructed in Pattern D.In terms of the internal structures,subordinate structures prevail in both English and Chinese disaster news discourses,and the proportion of subordinate structures is about three times higher than that of coordinate structures.But English discourses have relatively higher preference for subordinate structures than Chinese discourses.The present study expects to fill up the vacancy in the RST analysis of disaster news discourses and enriches the applications of Rhetorical Structure Theory and Contrastive Rhetoric in the field of discourse analysis.In the practical aspect,it hopes to provide references for the disaster news reporting in China's news industry,as well as the teaching and learning of disaster news discourses and the second language writing in English education sector. |
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