A Corpus-based Stylistic Comparison Between The English News Reports In Xinhua Net And BBC

The stylistic characters of English news have been rarely explored by previous studies,not to mention the analysis of stylistic differences between Chinese and Western media.This thesis intends to compare the BBC News Corpus(BNC,for short)and Xinhua News Corpus(XNC,for short)to find its stylistic similarities and differences.This thesis has theoretical significance and practical significance.From the perspective of theoretical significance,the thesis breaks the traditional concept of using stylistic theory to analyze the literary works and provides a new perspective for the study of the stylistic features of non-literary works,namely the expansion of Leech and Short's stylistic theory to non-literary works.Practically speaking,this thesis find the gap between ordinary English news and native English news,providing instruction and guidance for non-native English learners and English news teaching.There are seven stylistic similarities between XNC and BNC,it manifests in four aspects: lexical category,grammatical category,figure of speech and cohesion &context.Stylistic similarities in lexical category include word length,the ratios of adjective and verb;the grammatical similarities include the ratio of wh-determiner clauses and the ratio of past tense;the similarity in figure of speech is the simile;the similarity in cohesion & context is the ratio of subordination.There are eleven stylistic differences between XNC and BNC,details are as follows.There are four stylistic differences in lexical category: 1)TTR of English news in BNC(50.00)is higher than that of XNC(41.91),which means the vocabulary of BNC is more diverse.2)The ratios of N-letter words.The result shows that the XNC newspapers tend to use big and formal words,while the BNC more focuses on the use of shorter and clearer words.3)The ratio of noun in XNC(4.45/100 words)is higher than BNC(2.61/100 words).This kind of usage made XNC more abstract than BNC.4)XNC owns a larger lexical density(6.48/100words)than BNC(4.78/ 100words).Word density,a measure of the amount of information the text tries to convey,shows that the two corpora are comparable with each other.In grammatical category,four stylistic differences have been found: 1)Sentence length.The sentence lengthen of XNC(24.88)is longer than BNC(17.32).2)The ratios of wh-pronoun clause.3)The ratios of wh-adverb clause.The ratios of wh-pronoun clause and wh-adverb clause in XNC are 0.39/1000 words and 0.26/1000 words respectively,they are all higher than the ratio of BNC which are 0.14 and 0.11 respectively.It has been observed that XNC has a higher proportion of wh-pronoun clause and wh-adverb clause than BNC,which helps explain why the length of the sentences in XNC is much longer than that of the BNC.4)Present tense.The BNC are more inclined to use present tense than XNC.There are one stylistic differences in figure of speech: XNC used more repetition than BNC.There are two stylistic differences in cohesion and context: 1)The ratio of coordination.The ratio of coordination in XNC(0.35/100 words)is higher than that in BNC(0.19/100words).2)Direct speech and Indirect speech.Compared with BNC,XNC use more direct speeches & indirect speeches.To sum up,there are seven stylistic similarities and eleven stylistic differences between XNC and BNC.The limitations of this thesis are can be summarized in three main points.First,since the limitation of computer software,figure of speech cannot be annotated automatically.Second,this thesis only chooses eighteen stylistic features to study due to the restriction of annotation tools and search tool.Third,as far as corpus itself is concerned,this paper only collects the political news English of 2016,and does not cover all fields and aspects of news.Combining the research limitations,this thesis proposes three suggestions for future researches.First,future researchers should find more effective computer software to achieve their own research purposes.Secondly,except for the eighteen stylistic features selected in this thesis,future researchers can also choose other items which the present study is not involving to conduct their studies.Third,future studies can choose other field texts to study in order to enlarge the scope of study,such as cultural,entertainment and sports.