Functional Discourse Analysis Of News Reports In English And Chinese: A Contrastive Study

Discourse analysis has become one of the mainstreams in linguistics. From the stages and directions of discourse analysis we can see that the influence of functional grammar on discourse analysis has strengthened. In this thesis, the author attempts to conduct three quantitative contrastive studies on Chinese and English news reports by applying the analytic tools of functional grammar: transitivity, modality and theme.To make the corpora representative, totally 40 news texts are selected randomly from the two newspapers The New York Times and The People's Daily. From the research results, the author finds that though these two groups of samples share the same situation of context they differ from each other in lexical-grammatical choices.The analysis shows that Chinese reports and English reports share the same generic structure: material processes seem to dominate in both English and Chinese news reports, and then follow verbal processes and relational processes. As for the difference, it is found that ideologies reflected by certain choices of processes in the two language systems are different. It is also discovered that both Chinese and English reporters are inclined to make predictions on the future tendency of current affairs; and that modal verbs and adjuncts are usually found in quoted speeches. Differences between modality in English and Chinese news reports lie in that English reports involve expressions such as appear, be possible and so on which indicate direct perception by the writer of the state of affairs in a rather implicit way; and that comment adjuncts are used more frequently in English reports than those in Chinese reports. Thematic analysis shows that unmarked theme is an obvious feature of the genre of news reports and marked theme is mainly composed by conjunct themes. As for thematic progression, the statistic results show that the English and Chinese journalistic texts use the same TP patterns. But the sequences of the incidence of TP patterns in English and Chinese journalistic texts are different.At the end of the paper, the author proposes that the results of the study can be applied to the teaching of news translation and writing.