A Study Of Actually In China Daily And New York Times From The Linguistic Perspective

This paper focuses on the comprehensive linguistic features of actually occurring in English newspapers China Daily and New York Times . Recent researches have shown many disagreements about actually's identification as a discourse marker, or as an adverb; its core meaning; and its pragmatic functions. The present study tries to identify the syntactic features, semantic relations and pragmatic functions of this word, and also to discuss the similarities and differences of actually used in China Daily and New York Times and their causes and implications.This study is based on a large number of data from articles in China Daily published during June to October in 2010 and articles in New York Times published during June in 2010. With the help of AntConc 3.2.1 a nd manual searching, the detailed data of actually's usage are collected and sorted out. The analyses include actually's syntactic positions and functions; actually's semantic relations and functions; and actually's pragmatic functions. The quantitative analysis of actually's syntactic positions and the qualitative analysis of its semantic and pragmatic functions are done to explain the characteristics of its usage and the reasons for the characteristics with the help of examples.Findings indicate that: (1) concerning its syntactic positions, actually in China Daily prefers the initial and medial position, while in New York Times, actually would rather occur in the medial and final position; (2) the core meaning of actually is simply as emphasizing"truth"or"actuality", whether it is used to strengthen or to contradict the former proposition, it simply means the latter proposition is comparatively"much truer"or is"the definite truth"; (3) according to the features of its syntactic, semantic and pragmatic using situation, the function of actually can be classified into three categories: a. the highly restricted, adverb-like functions; b. the semantic functions restricted by its core meaning at propositional level; c. pragmatic function as discourse marker at the textual level.The comparative analyses between China Daily and New York Times show that when actually is used as an adverb, the results compared in both corpora are similar, and what is different is when actually is collocated with modal verbs, China Daily is more likely to use can, will, may . As to the semantic functions, China Daily prefers to use actually in additive and contradictive relations while New York Times shows no obvious preference. About the pragmatic functions, differed from the previous studies, actually is found to be more likely used by China Daily as topic transition marker than as face-threatening mitigator. In the last part, the implications for language teachings and future studies are discussed and the limitations of this study are pointed out.