A Quantitative Analysis Of Journalistic Texts From The New York Times And Time

Over the past hundreds of years, syntactic structures have been a heated point which attracted linguistic experts to explore it from different points of view. Through a thorough literature review, the results show that most of scholars made efforts to explore the external structures from the angle of description and specification, and few scholars focused on the internal linguistic thinking reflected by the grammatical features. The language in press has gradually become the typical sample due to its characteristics such as realistic, popularization, and standardization. Based on what have investigated, this thesis is intended to analyze journalistic texts from the perspective of linguistic thinking with samples chosen from NewYork Times and Time concerning three popular themes: energy, food safety, and ecological protection. This thesis aims to discover the characteristics of linguistic sequences reflected in the relevant syntactic structures by the approach of minibank combined with relevant syntactic theories. Both quantitative and qualitative methodologies are adopted to analyze and describe how the linguistic sequences are reflected in the syntactic structures and how the English Linguistic-Sequence Orientation works to develop the linguistic thinking.This thesis is expected to offer the objective evidence to reflect the essence of language and supply the language learners with referential value.This thesis totally consists of six parts. The thesis begins with a brief introduction in which the purpose of this thesis, the motivation of the thesis, and the significance of the thesis are briefly introduced with the layout of this thesis.The first chapter is the part of literature review. In this part, some research results concerning syntactic structures home and abroad are reviewed, and the results indicate that few scholars have researched and investigated the syntactic structures from the perspective of linguistic thinking, which triggers the motivation of this thesis.Chapter two is the part of theoretical framework. In this part, the relevant theories of syntax and linguistic thinking are briefly introduced. And at the same time, the basic framework of English Linguistic-Sequence Orientation is put forward based on the previous theories. Through the interface with semantics, this method is able to transform the external sequences into the internal issues of linguistic thinking to discover the essence of linguistic thinking.The third chapter is the methodology of this thesis. In this part, a number of methods adopted by this thesis are introduced briefly including the principle of building a minibank, the principle of tagging, the ways of cleaning the raw samples, the retrieval software of AntConc 3.2.1, the wildcard-assisted skill for building the minibank, the regular expressions and so on. According to the scientific principle of sampling, sixty samples with different themes are collected at random from the NewYork Times and Time and tagged by the means of manual tagging indicating the unique innovation: (1) multiple themes with ages spanned; (2) new tags. The samples are collected from 1980s to the 21st century from which the latest changes of linguistic phenomena are inclined to be found as well as the regular sequences. Meanwhile, the new tags also break through the traditional classification of syntactic structures. In addition, thirty samples of compositions of Chinese college students are collected which are built into a corpus as the referential corpus.Chapter four is the part of analysis and discussion which serves as the main body of the thesis. On the basis of retrieval data from the minibank, eleven regular sequences are found such as the Left Branch System, the Right Branch System, and the Compound Sequence and so on. Simultaneously, both qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis are adopted to analyze and argue about the sequences in order to find the characteristics of linguistic sequences and further discover the essence of linguistic thinking. Moreover, the English Linguistic-Sequence Orientationis also analyzed and argued. At the end of this thesis, the illuminating function of this thesis for language teaching is discussed.Chapter five is the discussion and summary of this thesis which mainly discuss how the establishment of linguistic thinking exerts an impact on the foreign language teaching. At the same time, the inevitable limitation and errors of this thesis should not be ignored because of the manual tagging and lack of time as well as the limited number of samples.