A Comparative Study On Grammatical Features Of English Newspaper Reports In China

Newspapers today are an integral part of our society.They inform and entertain people in the world everyday.Inevitably,reading English newspaper has become a good way to learn English and to know the outside world.But does the language used by English newspapers published in China and that used by newspapers published in English speaking countries share similar syntactic features or differ much from each other.to reveal the syntactic difference and similarities two newspapers are selected—China Daily and the New York Times.Based on the previous studies,this study aims to explore the syntactic features of English newspaper published in China in comparison with newspaper published in the United States.Findings show that there do exist syntactic similarities and differences between English news reports of the two newspapers.On average,sentences employed in China Daily are a little bit longer than those in the New York Times.And the frequency of using subordinate clause is lower,which manifests that China Daily employs longer phrases instead of subordinate clauses.And a deeper analysis on the use of noun phrases reveals that American English news reports tend to use more post-modifiers;while in Chinese ones pre-modifiers are usually adopted.As far as the types of sentences are concerned,similarities go with the using of compound sentence and compound complex sentence.However,for the simple and complex sentence,the comparison between the two shows a contrary contrast,more simple sentences are found in China Daily and more complex in the New York Times.The analysis of subordinate clause reveals that China Daily tends to use more nominal clauses and fewer relative clauses,though the difference is by no means significant.But for adverbial clause the percentages in the two are almost the same.The findings on the placement of adverbial clause show that there is a tendency of using initial adverbial clause in the NYT,and the distribution of initial adverbials sentence in the NYT is more balanced than that in CD,which lies in the different culture background and different thinking ways.Though some of the findings go against the previous viewpoints,they have their reasonability as it is a quantitative study based on international news reports.It is hoped that researchers engage into a systematic analysis of English newspaper published in China from a comprehensive perspective in exploring more linguistic points,such as phonological,lexical and discourse analysis.