A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And American Newspaper Editorials From The Perspective Of Metadiscourse

As the spirit of mass media, editorials represent the opinions of the newspaper tocomment on current events or issues happened recently in society. The words used ineditorials are characteristic of logic and eloquence which can deeply attract and influencereaders. Consequently, editorials mainly focus on publishing and expounding beliefs in alogical and concise way to convince readers. Editorial writing, as a way ofmeaning-making, is never neutral but always seeks to find how the writer or speaker’sperspectives, interests and values are conveyed to the reader. Editorials consist of twointerpersonal aims: evaluating certain events and convincing readers.Metadiscourse, one of the focuses of discourse analysis, is used exactly to accomplishthese goals. Metadiscourse is one of the main means to involve writers and their readers inmutual acts of comprehension and engagement. It is used to organize the discourse into alogical and coherent part, support the writer’s position and build a relationship with theaudience. Many researches have been done concerning metadiscourse in China and abroad,for example, abroad, the study of Metadiscourse in argumentation of university students(Intaraprawat, 1988), school textbooks (Crismore, 1989), science popularization (Crismoreand Farnsworth, 1990), postgraduate dissertations (Bunton, 1999; Hyland, 2004; Swales,1990) as well as the study of metadiscourse in English writing (Cheng Xiaoguang &JiangHui) and scientific dissertation (Yu Jianping, 2007) in China. However, little research touches upon the genre of editorials. As a matter of fact, what we concern mostly in thisthesis is how the writer achieves the purpose of editorials through the use of metadiscourse.Since English texts under different cultural backgrounds also maintain their own writingtraditions, it is necessary to carry out a contrastive analysis of editorials from Englishnewspapers in China and abroad.Briefly three questions are explored: 1) How is metadiscourse used in the selectedEnglish editorials written by Chinese and Americans? 2) What are the possible causes oftheir differences and similarities? 3) How is metadiscourse used to construct theinterpersonal relationship in the selected English editorials?To answer the above questions, the thesis chooses fifty English editorials fromChina Daily and fifty from New York Times to have a contrastive analysis onmetadiscourse on the basis of Hyland’s classification criteria (2005). Firstly, quantitativeanalysis is adopted to discuss similarities and differences of metadiscourse from theperspective of frequency (per 1,000 words) and proportion. Secondly, possible reasons forthe similarities and differences as well as the way that metadiscourse is used to constructinterpersonal relationship are also explored based upon qualitative analysis.The results show that metadiscourse devices are frequently used in the two groupsand have revealed some similarities in metadiscourse use, which may adequately indicatethat both of them have known the importance of metadiscourse and can use metadiscourseappropriately to organize the text and interact with the reader. However, some differencesalso exist between them. The frequencies of interactive items used by NYT are higher thanthat of CD (74.65 vs 61.67), but interactional items are lower than that of CD (72.23 vs86.94). Moreover, in both CD and NYT, transitions, hedges and attitude markers are themost frequently used ones and the least frequently used metadiscoursal items in bothcorpora are frame markers and endophoric markers. As for other subcategories,engagement markers and boosters are more frequently used while code glosses andevidentials are less used in CD than NYT.The thesis also analyzes the possible reasons for these differences and similaritieswhich are summarized as genre conventions, cultural conventions caused by differentsocial system and ideology. At the end of this dissertation, the way that metadiscourse is used to construct the interpersonal relationship is also concluded as prompting the state ofcommunication, ensuring the natural flow of the communication, helping the writer allywith the reader psychologically and benefiting the writer from revealing his or heraffective attitude to their audience.