A Comparative Genre Study On English Editorials In Chinese And American Newspapers

Editorials,as the most prestigious form of writing and one of the most authoritative text types among the various text types in a newspaper,play an important role both for the newspaper and the public.Editors often employ various strategies to express opinions,attitudes and views about the current events and problems.Thus,editorials have gradually attracted the interest of many scholars in the linguistic field.As a hot topic in linguistics,genre analysis has become a useful tool in describing linguistic features of a genre and linking them to their functions and communicative purposes.It provides a method to identify the communicative strategies or moves and the linguistic features found in genres.Inspired by Zarza and Tan' research(2016),the present study conducts a comparative genre analysis of the English editorials in Chinese and American newspaper.The present study aims to investigate the similarities and differences between them in terms of the move structure and linguistic features.Besides,the study also explores the underlying reasons for their features.Through the quantitative analysis as well as the qualitative analysis of 30 editorials including 15 editorials from China Daily and 15 editorials from The New York Times,the comparative analysis revealed the following major findings:First of all,the move structures of both corpora show a consistent genre type and the same moves in the two corpora serve the same communicative purposes and the differences are not quite obvious at the move level.To be specific,the move structure of Chinese newspaper editorials include five obligatory moves,which are Move 1 Headline,Move 2 Presenting the case/problem,Move 3 Reviewing,Move 4 Justifying or refuting events and Move 5 Articulating a position while the move structure of the American newspaper editorials contains four obligatory moves,which are Move 1 Headline,Move 2 Presenting the case/problem,Move 3 Justifying or refuting events and Move 4 Articulating a position.The differences at the step level lie in the total number of steps,and the different selection of steps within the same move.In terms of the linguistic features,the results show that both Chinese and American newspaper editorials dominantly adopt the active voice construction rather than the passive voice construction to simplify the complicated event by reducing ambiguity and distance between readers and editors.As for modality,the results revealed that there are no significant differences in the use of different expressions of modality in terms of the total number in the two corpora,but differences exist in the selection of different expressions of modality in detailed moves and steps.To be specific,the differences are related to the different situational contexts.Besides,cultural factors and sociohistorical factors also influence the selection of different steps and linguistic strategies.