A Contrastive Analysis Of English And Chinese Weather Forecasts

Weather forecast,as an indispensable part of our production and daily life,can be found on radios,TV,newspapers and periodicals,etc.As a special discourse pattern,it plays the role of predicting the forthcoming state of atmosphere for a certain place,so as to provide circumstantial assurance for the people in the place to arrange their life and production wisely.However,for quite some time,particular attention has been habitually paid to its practical value,while no due importance has been attached to its linguistic value.This thesis employs Halliday's meta-functions as its theoretical foundation.Through contrastive discourse analyses of 5 pieces of research data collected from Chinese and English weather forecast discourses respectively from the perspective of ideational function and interpersonal function,the similarities and differences of the two discourses in a variety of aspects are presented.With detailed analyses,their discourse models and language features are exposed.Meanwhile,some underlying causes of these features are explored and summarized.Major findings of this research can be summarized as follows:Firstly,in terms of ideational meta-function,the author finds that Chinese and English weather forecast discourses have the following similarities on the basis of transitivity analysis: material processes occupy a large majority over the other processes in both discourses,while no behavioral process exists.In Chinese weather forecast,existential processes rank the second.Most of the existential processes are structured with the circumstantial elements of place acting as the Themes.In English weather forecast,the existential processes are not used so frequently as those in Chinese.As for the voice system,active voice and middle voice are of the highest frequency,with active voice being used much more frequently than middle voice and passive voice as a whole in both discourses.Secondly,in terms of interpersonal meta-function,according to the mood analysis of the two discourses,among the four speech roles,declarative mood is absolutely dominant in both discourses,while no interrogative or exclamative mood can be found?Through modality analysis,it is clearly shown that the utilization of modal words expressing probability accounts for the largest proportion in both discourses.