| Hard news refers to political,economic,and technological news with serious subject matter and emphasis on ideology,guidance and knowledge.Compared with lively and pleasant soft news,hard news accounts for a larger proportion in quantity and has a complete and orderly structure;therefore,it possesses broadly the prospect of study.In recent years,a majority of domestic research on stance markers has focused too much on academic thesis writing,whereas the study of stance markers and the comparative study of stance in news discourse,especially hard news are accustomed to being ignored by scholars.This article selects English corpora from four authoritative media,CNN and New York Times from America,China Daily and CCTV News from China,in order to establish an English hard news corpus from three aspects of economy,technology,and politics.In accordance with Geqi Wu’s analysis framework(2010),this article creatively built a thesaurus of stance markers in news,and then indexed and positioned various stance markers appearing in each news discourse by the means of Antconc3.5.7.After collecting and disposing all available data,this article began to analyze and compare the difference of stance markers in Chinese and American English hard news discourses with the aid of SPSS23.0,exploring the underlying reasons and discussing the impact of different values of journalism on the use of stance markers in China and the United States.Theoretically,this article enriches the study of stance markers in news text from a new perspective.In addition,its practical significance consists in that it can provide a practical and effective approach for people to enhance their critical discourse reading ability in English news reports.Besides,this study may offer instructions to and even improve English news writing in China.The study mainly discovered that English hard news of America has more stance markers than China.The frequency of Hedges in American news is much higher than that in hard news of China;however,Chinese authors of English hard news incline to apply more boosters to express stance.Among attitude markers,more affect and negative evaluation markers appear in hard news of America than China.The potential causes are in line with diverse cultural values,writing patterns,rhetorical persuasion patterns,and properties of mass media between China and the West.The shortcomings of this research include relatively small-scale corpus,incomprehensive classification of hard news,and subjectivity in building thesaurus of stance markers.It is hoped that future scholars can strengthen the research of stance on the news genre and establish a comprehensive corpus with a large corpora base.They can extend a comparative study of stance markers from a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective. |
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