The Language Application Analysis Of Crime Reporting In Chinese And English

Crime, as a deviance from the established social norms, is an abnormal situation for any functioning society, the information about which is tightly related to the sense of security and the practical existence and development of every current social member. From the perspective of communication studies criminal coverage is the one major source of information about this serious breach of social order for most audience who has no direct access, experiential or visionary, to a criminal event. This makes the media's coverage of crimes the decisive shaping influence on how people perceive crimes and how they shall respond to that constructed scene of symbols in the real world.Employing case study as the choice method of research, this paper compares in detail how Chinese and American-dominated English reportage of crimes use their languages. The aim of the comparison is to reveal the difference in the forms of reportage, the understanding of media's social functions, and the recognition of predominant social ideologies in social environments as disparate as in China and the US. Based on the analysis and comparison, the author plans to construct an ideal model of reportage, with professionalism and social functionalism at its extremities. At the end of the paper, the points which Chinese crime coverage should draw from English counterparts are listed, and the trend of development in the field is predicted to render the paper practically meaningful.