Lexical Study Of Wenchuan Earthquake English Reporting Between Chinese And American Media

Wenchuan Earthquake,attracting every Chinese person's attention,is a big disaster to Sichuan citizens and means a lot to them.Media all over the world,including broadcastings,televisions or newspapers,show great concern about the earthquake reporting.Based on different cultures and ideologies,the similarities and differences between the usage of the language in Chinese English media and American media arouse the attention of some researchers.This paper,adopting a corpus-based study,makes an investigation of the lexical features on the quake-reporting between Chinese media and American media,so as to uncover Chinese journalists' and Western journalists' attitudes towards the news about the earthquake during their reporting.Two corpora(CMCWE and AMCWE) were established in order to make an objective and convincing analysis.The news materials are all collected from the official websites on the internet.With the aid of the computational softwares SPSS,Wordsmith and Collocate,the lexical study is undertaken quantitatively and qualitatively on key words between CMCWE and AMCWE.The key words are the words that occur with unususal frequency in CMCWE and AMCWE,compared to the reference copus(Brown corpus).The anayses of key words are divided into two parts:the positive key words and the negative key words, followed by the analyses of these key words from the perspectives of collocations and semantic prosody.Through comparison,it has been perceived that many similarities as well as some differences exist between CMCWE and AMCWE.Firstly,the lexicons used in both corpora are register-specific and earthquake-related.For example,many words with negative meanings are frequently used in both corpora.Secondly,American journalists are more objective in the earthquake reporting while Chinese journalists have a strong emotional tendency towards the earthquake.Thirdly,Chinese journalists report the news about earthquake in full scales in order to meet the needs of the readers,but American journalists show emphasis on some news,such as the news related to Panda and School,and some news reported by them implies their dissatisfaction.The results can shed lights on English learning and teaching.