| With the development of society,the narrative time and viewpoint in news narrative discourse have distinct characteristics.From the perspective of time,the change of viewpoint usually results in the use of various time.At the same time,the change of narrative time can be a sign to identify the change of narrators and viewpoint.The narrative time can be an important symbol of transferring viewpoint,so it is said that the narrative time and viewpoint complement each other.Previous studies have focused on the narrative time and viewpoint in literary works.Given the differences between Chinese and English languages,this research mainly discusses the news narrative following two issues:(1)The relationship between the change of news narrative time and the change of narrative viewpoint.(2)Are there any differences of viewpoint in English and Chinese news narratives,and what are the reasons for the differences?This study mainly focuses on the contrastive analysis of time and viewpoint in Chinese and English mainstream media from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.First,four news narrations are collected on the topic of the influence caused by Covid-19.One is from the website of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal including two English news reports.Another two Chinese news reports are collected from the website of China Daily.This study focuses on time,time-related tenses,and time deixis in Chinese and English news texts.It suggests that there are differences in the representation of narrative time in Chinese and English news narrative discourse.Afterward,based on the news narrative mental space model,a comparative analysis of the narrative time of Chinese and English news texts is carried out from Narrative Space including the News Space,the Source Space,the Intermediate Space as well as the Narrative-external Discourse Space.At the same time,it also verifies the powerful explanation of the mental space model for news narrative discourse.There are three major findings in this research:(1)Time and viewpoint are closely related to the cognitive representation of news narratives.The dynamic process of viewpoint has an impact on the time usage of news narratives.Time connects the past news events with the present moment and transforms the viewpoint and narrative deictic center through the movement of time in the mental space model.The mixture of the journalists’ viewpoint and actors’ viewpoints in news narratives makes the narrative structure more complicated,so news narratives realize the conversion and management of viewpoint through the shuttle of time in the mental space model.(2)English news narratives prefer to use the present tense in Narrative Space and end one News Space with the viewpoint of the news actors,impressing the readers with the severity of Covid-19 while Chinese news narratives adopt the past tense in Narrative Space and change it to the present tense at the end of each News Space to place the readers at a safe distance from Covid-19.Besides,the viewpoint transformation of Chinese news does not rely too much on tense,but adopts direct and indirect speeches to manage the narrative viewpoint;there is no obvious verb tense transformation in Chinese,and distinctions in ways of thinking between English and Chinese. |
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