Cohesion In Evening-Paper-Review Broadcasting Of China National Radio

This research attempts to analyze cohesive devices in news items in Evening- Paper-Review Broadcasting (EPR) jointly organized by the China National Radio (CNR) and the major 40 Evening Papers throughout the nation within the framework of text linguistics and story grammar.Coherence is a major property of text and coherence research has been a significant aspect in text analysis. Admittedly, cohesion definitely contributes to the realization of coherence of a given text. We know cohesion is a semantic relation of textual meaning.Different cohesive devices, in different texts, have different cohesive relations in the text. First, the research has a general theoretical account of the existing studies on cohesion, coherence and their relations. Then a detailed analysis of cohesive devices in EPR broadcasting is done from the linguistic and cognitive perspectives so that we can get a more comprehensive framework of cohesion research. First of all, language is the object of cohesion and coherence studies, therefore, the linguistic features of text and certain linguistic theories must be involved in the present study. But the linguistic theory alone is not enough. The theory of story grammar is further adopted in analyzing this news report because a piece of news is just like a story containing certain relatively fixed components. Usually, one story component in both news stories is more salient that any other components. In this radio program, the newscaster, as a matter of fact, is also a reader who finds it necessary to repeat this salient component in the preceding news and to make it an activated state. Then there comes the same story component of the upcoming news and cohesion is thus created between two pieces of news successfully. This is the very reason why certain story component such as the setting is chosen to become a cohesive device between two successive news. Note that the theory of story grammar is closely related with schemata and frames, which is actually a top-down processing in facilitating our interpretation of a given text. The above two approaches to EPR broadcasting are complementary in analyzing how two pieces of news cohere in EPR broadcasting.