Discourse Structure Of Modern Chinese News Commentaries

Text structure is an important research area of text linguistics.However,for a long time,the structure of Chinese texts has been examined respectively from macro and micro levels.The former focuses on the schematic structure and its direct components in realizing the communicative purpose of a certain genre,while the latter focuses on the textual function analysis of lexical and syntactic structures.This fault line of the category of structural research is not conducive to understanding the essence of text,nor to acknowledging the mechanism of text construction.Meanwhile,text,as an entity of meaning,is reflected not only in the unitary structure of components and their combinations,but also in the multi-structural system driven by functions.This study investigates the generic structure,relational structure and information structure of Chinese news commentaries from a functional approach,taking into account hierarchy and semantic relations,interpersonal and cohesive resources of a text.The paper discusses in detail the components of generic structure,the generic structure potential and the lexico-grammatical realization of transitivity system in Chinese news commentaries.It also examines types,distributions,cross-level recursion and differences of rhetorical relations,as well as the flow of textual information.In the analysis of each structure,macro and micro units are linked by the examination of the realization of adjacent levels of a text.The dissertation is divided into six chapters:Chapter One introduces the research background,research questions,research methodology and significance of the research.The study adopts the following three approaches:(1)structural analysis corresponding to text function;(2)both ‘top-down'and ‘bottom-up' structural analysis;(3)structure analysis together with text semantic analysis.Chapter Two reviews the main theories and methods of text structure research home and abroad,and points out the limitations of previous studies.Firstly,thecontent and category of text structure are not clearly defined.Secondly,the model of text structure analysis is not so well-designed as to bridge the macro and micro levels of the text.Thirdly,the study on the structure of different genres is not balanced.Therefore,an in-depth study of news commentaries from a functional perspective could remedy the previous unitary approach in text structure research and provide a holistic observation of discourse structure.The study intends to analyze the multidimensional structures of news commentaries from the perspectives of experiential function,logical function and textual function.Chapter Three investigates the structure,function and lexico-grammatical realization of the generic structure of news commentaries.The findings show that news commentaries have a communicative context-driven structure potential,which can be expressed as summary^[(background)° event]^[(general comment)^[comment]^(conclusion).Among them,summary,event and comment are the compulsory elements of the generic structure,while conclusion is optional.Generic structure reflects the topological characteristics of commentary discourse driven by context and communicative purpose,while the distribution of clausal transitivity process types provides lexico-grammatical motivation for generic structure.The findings of this study also indicate that transitivity process types display a similar trend of distribution in both the title and main body of the text,i.e.action process >relational process > mental process > verbal process.The fact that action process of commentary discourse is slightly higher than that of relational process indicates that commentary discourse is not a prototype of argumentative genre,but a special subcategory of argumentative genre relying on facts and trying to construct virtual facts as the main mode of argumentation.Drawing this linguistic evidence,news commentaries should be distinguished from other subcategories of argumentative genre in genre classification.Chapter Four analyzes the rhetorical structures between clauses,sentences and paragraphs.The results show that clause-level and sentence-level rhetorical relations are most abundant,represented by 24 rhetorical relation types from five categories.As the hierarchy expands to higher levels of the text,some rhetorical relations are foundrecursive,while others absent.Among those recursive relations,some are used less frequently,while others are more prominent and show obvious generic features.On top of this,from the similarities and differences of semantic relations across levels,it can be seen that the rhetorical relations in a text are realized at different discourse levels,reflecting a tendency of pragmatic choice.The micro level is the fundamental level of semantic relations,which is rich in relation types,but may be restricted by syntactic and semantic structures of a clause or a sentence.At the macro level,this kind of restriction gradually weakens,and the choice of semantic relations are more context-dependent.This also explains the reason why abrupt changes occur in the distribution of some major rhetorical relations at the higher level of discourse.Chapter Five explores information flow and progression from the micro level to the macro level by analyzing the distribution of different types of Themes at the clause level,thematic progression at the sentence level,superThemes and superNews,macroThemes and macroNews at the level above paragraphs.To be more specific,the information structure of news commentaries is characterized by strong markedness of information flow,interlocking information promotion and distinct hierarchy.At the clause level,multiple Themes appear frequently,particularly marked topical Themes realized by circumstantial elements and textual Themes realized by conjunctive Adjuncts,which reflects the writer-responsible writing style of news commentaries.At the sentence level,linear and derived thematic progression patterns are dominant,indicating the information development of commentary discourse is both linear and divergent.At the macro level of paragraphs,stages and even the whole text,hyperThemes and hyperNews accumulated by the information flow of clauses coincide with paragraphs,while macroThemes and macroNews accumulated by hyperThemes and hyperNews of paragraphs coincide with the stages of generic structure.This further illustrates the information development of news commentaries not only works at different levels,but also shows consistency with the natural hierarchy of discourse.Chapter Six summarizes the main findings,points out the limitations of the present study and gives recommendation for future research.By taking a functional perspective and drawing knowledge from text semantics,this study investigates the types,levels and lexico-grammatical realization of different functional structures of news commentary texts,which has both theoretical and practical implications.In theory,the study proposes an analytic framework for multidimensional text structures and discusses the distribution and development of these text structures at different levels,which not only better explains the construction of text structure,but also reexamines text function from a more diversified perspective and clarifies the relationship between different functional categories.The structure of the text is not planar,but a multidimensional structure restricted by multiple functions;the structure of the text is not discrete,but a hierarchical construction process in which the macroscopic and microscopic structures are interconnected.By analyzing functional structures of news commentaries,this study sets a linguistic basis for judging the genre of news commentary.In terms of application,this study provides a theoretical and practical reference for genre-based reading and writing pedagogy,which is beneficial for language learners to raise their awareness of text types,better grasp the hierarchical relationship of a text,and improve their ability to understand and compose texts.