A Study Of Narrative Strategies In Haiti Earthquake Reports In The New York Times And The Guangming Daily From A Cognitive Perspective

With the development of narrative theories and cognitive science, scholars do realize that narration goes beyond the realm of literature and narration itself can be treated as an integrate mental activity in constructing and understanding the storyworld and it also reflects the cognitive process.However, domestic studies combining narration with cognition are mostly applied to the fields of literature and films, leaving disaster news discourse barely touched by far. This thesis is an attempt to apply the nexus between narration and cognition to disaster news discourse, trying to study news narrative strategies from a cognitive perspective and analyze cognitive processes reflected by different narrative strategies.At the beginning, the present thesis reviews the inseparable relation between narrative theories and cognitive science, and explains narration is a basic mental activity to express and cognize the world. Firstly, narrative is part of cognitive science; secondly, narrative is a cognitive artifact and a thinking tool; thirdly, narration, as a form to represent basic mental action, also reflects cognitive processes behind it. By defining these concepts, the thereorical foundation to study narrative strategies from a cognitive perspective is established. Then, this thesis compares the narrative strategy in terms of narrator, narrative time, narrative point of view and news frames, etc., of Haiti earthquake news articles published in The New York Times and The Guangming Daily. Moreover, by analyzing these differences, different cognitive processes are approached and factors that influence these differences are inferred in the end.