A Comparative Analysis Of The Use Of Metadiscourse In English And Chinese News Reporting

Due to the increasing international communication, news reporting, which tellspeople what is happening around the world, plays the role of public voice that can affectinternational opinions and promotes the communication among countries. In order towrite a piece of decent and good news reporting, writers have to use metadiscourse.Metadiscourse, as a linguistic phenomenon, can not only make readers clear about theorganization of the discourse so that they can understand it better, but also engage thereaders and make connection between readers and writers.In this thesis, the author adopts Hyland and Tse·s taxonomy of metadiscourse toanalyze70news reportings (with35Chinese one and35English ones respectively).According to Hyland and Tse, metadiscourse is composed of two big taxonomies:interactive metadiscourse and interactional metadiscourse. Each of them consists of fivesubcategories respectively. All the70news reportings are selected from China NewsPrize and Pulitzer Prize.Based on the corpora, this thesis intends to analyze the similar and different use ofmetadiscourse between English and Chinese news reportings, finding out the features ofthe use of metadiscourse in the two different cultural backgrounds and providing somepositive references for the future writing and translation of English and Chinese newsreporting.The results show that:(1) metadiscourse is frequently used both in Chinese andEnglish news reportings, and more interactive resources are employed both in Englishand Chinese news reortings than interactional resources are;(2) English news reportingsuse interactive resources more often than Chinese writers;(3) within all the subcategoriesof metadiscourse, transitions are the most frequently used both in Chinese and Englishnews reportings. And including transitions, differences are found in evidentials,engagement markers and self-mentions between Chinese and English news reportings.