| Time concept is a major core dimension in people's life,calling for artificial workmanship.People sense time in such three aspects as temporal succession,temporal duration,and temporal locus.Therefore,different cognitive strategies of time lead to different time expressions,providing a reasonable understanding of why language-users employ different words to express time.Additionally,time is not quantified when processing the features of vagueness,which roots in many reasons,including the objective and subjective reasons.Being an intrinsic property of natural language,vagueness,as it is,has been significantly studied by academia in China and abroad,and many scholars have researched vagueness from multidisciplinary and inter-disciplinary perspectives.Few,however,relate the vagueness in the time domain to study time vagueness.The news reports,as the most effective means of conveying information,are expected to seek for time accuracy when reporters cover news due to the timeliness,truthfulness,and accuracy so as to avoid negative feedback.This thesis,however,gives scientific data to show that,both in Chinese news reports and English news reports,there exist many vague expressions of time.In order to find the reasons,this thesis hammers at building two corpora of Chinese and English news reports,then quantitatively-assisted and qualitatively-based analyses on the concrete application of vague expressions of time in either of the two corpora,answering these questions: What are frequencies and distributions of vague expressions of time in Chinese and English news reports? What are the differences in frequency and distribution of vague expressions of time between English and Chinese news reports? What are the similarities in the use of vague expressions of time between Chinese and English news reports? The research finds out that not only the Chinese news reporters but also the English ones frequently adopt vague expressions of time,demonstrating different styles.But the similarity in both of them adapt to the mental world,social world,and physical world.This thesis applies itself to the comparative study of time vagueness in Chinese and English news reports,helping people to touch upon different time values and news values,even promoting the communication with each other via news media and helping news readers to have a more accurate understanding of time expressions.The study enriches the applied analysis of vague language with broadening research scope of time vagueness,and also contributes to news language by profoundly grasping and understanding time concept. |
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