A Contrastive Study On Text Structures Of Sino-American English News Stories

In the last two decades when China has been deepening and expanding her international communication with the other parts of the world, the learning, use and research of English language have been embracing an unprecedented upsurge. People endeavor to explore features of the English used by Chinese people. However, numerous researches focus on the aspects like lexicon, grammar, rhetoric and writing style, and text structure turns out to be the area lacking of due attention. Therefore, the author of the thesis attempts to use English news stories written by Chinese (ENSC) and those written by native English speakers, Americans (ENSA) as targeted language material to conduct a contrastive analysis on text structure, for the purpose of discovering structural patterns of the two types of texts, disclosing their similarities and differences and finally ascertaining whether or not Chinese abide by the native speakers' convention in English writing in text structure.In consideration of the research objective, the author selected 24 pieces or 12 pairs of economic English news stories sharing same major topics from well-known English newspapers and magazines in China and America to discuss text structures of ENSC and ENSA from micro and macro perspectives. Based on functional grammar, the thesis adopts thematic progression pattern (TPP) theory and semantic macrostructure (SM) theory of van Dijk as its theoretical support to fulfill the task.Halliday involved theme-rheme structure notion in his functional grammar and other scholars also discovered that there are several types of TPP which could be utilized to analyze logic and structural relationship between sentences, and explore general development of text so as to reflect structural patterns from micro perspective. Combining findings of several scholars, the research decides to select 5 kinds of frequently-seen TPP (namely, parallel pattern, extended pattern, endocentric pattern, zigzag pattern, and skipping pattern) as research focus to disclose similarities and differences between ENSC and ENSA from micro perspective.While in macro perspective, according to van Dijk's SM theory, text contains both linear relation and hierarchical relation. Propositions in the lowest level are basic components of microstructures, which further construct macrostructure through macrorules. Micro and macro-structures are relative concepts. Any structure at a level can be viewed as a macrostructure in comparison with structures in lower level. And the macrostructure at the top level reflect the global proposition of a whole text. In this sense, a text is a hierarchical construction with micro- and macro-structures in different levels. The research utilizes the theory to analysis macropropositions in every hierarchical level to finally figure out semantic-logic relation among them or topics. On this base, tree-diagrams of 12 pairs of news texts reflecting topic shift and development are produced to display overall structure patterns of ENSC and ENSA.As to research method, contrastive analysis is used in both micro and macro aspects. The author conducts sample analysis, overall data processing and observation of general tendency for ENSC and ENSA. In macro aspect, statistical verification is specially applied to ascertain the significant difference between the two from statistical point of view. Through careful analysis, the research discovers that in micro perspective, the major difference lies in the dominant TPP in both types of texts: in ENSC, skipping pattern is the dominant and endocentric pattern is the least frequent, while in ENSA, endocentric pattern is the dominant. In other three patterns, the two are close to each other. The only difference indicates that in micro aspect, ENSC is relatively skipping and loose in form while ENSA is more concentrated, direct and straightforward, inclined to focus on topics one by one. On the other hand, in macro aspect, the general tendency is that ENSC is balanced in subordinated and coordinated patterns while ENSA is overwhelmingly subordinated. However, two statistical tests for small sample do not confirm significant difference between the two. Besides, findings in micro and macro aspects are on a whole consistent. Given that ENSC is loose and skipping, it is likely to be coordinated while ENSA is concentrated and straightforward, and it is apt to be subordinated. The findings seem to be in line with findings in Chinese-English structural comparison, except that the difference between ENSC and ENSA is much smaller and insignificant. On the whole, ENSC are acceptable and successful in text structure.The research is a worthy application of TPP and SM theories, which once again demonstrate their effectiveness and practicability. The findings not only help Chinese improve their English writing ability, promote the development of English news media and China's communication with the outside world, but also play an active part in pedagogical sense, helping English learners better acquire English writing skills in text structure and overcome the negative influence of convention of Chinese writing.