A Corpus-based Stylistic Comparison Of Political English News Delivered By British And Chinese Media

With the rapid development of information technology and increasingly frequentinternational communication, English news is playing a more and more important rolein bridging the world and exchanging information. The English news in variouspublications such as newspapers, magazines and journals has become an effective wayfor English learners as well as researchers to acquire different messages involving theEnglish language.In the world’s major publications, political English news often occupies a largeproportion of news coverage, which highlights the importance of political topics inEnglish news. This is not only presented in the newspapers or journals that are issued inthe countries where English is spoken as mother tongue, but also can be found in such apublication as China Daily that is issued in non-English countries like China. By wayof a piece of political news, the attitude held by the writer, by the media, even by thegovernment can be fairly perceived between the lines, especially through word choices,sentence patterns and textual structure. Moreover, in view of one and the same politicalevent, despite of the same writing language-English, the news language can probablypossess stylistic differences that are brought about by diverse writing purposes anddifferent standpoints. Therefore, it often occurs that when readers are confronted withtwo manners of coverage of the same political event, they are always confused by thelanguage differences despite of many similarities in common, and thus the real eventscannot be reflected as they exist; the news cannot reach a maximum value of factuality and validity. Usually, the problem should be easily solved within the field of linguistics,but the real situation is that the study related to political English news is largelyincluded in the category of news editing and translation, which can be hardly found inthe form of independent research, it follows that no theories are available for explainingthe differences in the English news delivered by Chinese and British media. Therefore,for linguistic researchers, it is significant to find out those differences, to make clearhow those differences are produced and to give a detailed and objective comparison tothe readers.On the other hand, with respect to the approach to linguistic study, a corpus builton computer science and developing in great progress provides us an approach, whichis more persuasive than theoretical illustration for it is scientific and objective. Giventhe study in this thesis, British National Corpus (BNC) is selected as the source ofpolitical English news, which is the largest corpus available on the Internet and widelyapplied in the linguistic research. Besides, a corpus of political English news comingfrom China Daily is constructed for the stylistic comparison with BNC.Based on the two sources of news texts, this thesis is focused on the stylisticcomparison of political English news delivered by Chinese and British media, which isprocessed at lexical, syntactical and discourse level. With the help of SPSS, thesimilarities and differences in the political English news delivered by British andChinese media can be worked out and analyzed. Particularly, the causal discussion ofthe differences is also illustrated from several aspects. Specifically, three mainperspectives may contribute to the differences that exist in political English news respectively delivered by British and Chinese media, that is, the political standpoints,the cultural origins and the factor of media bias.To sum up, this thesis falls into the scope of English news, adopting acorpus-based approach, and attempting to identify the similarities and differences of thepolitical English news delivered by British and Chinese media. It is suggested that thecomparative study of real news texts with a corpus-based approach can achieve amaximum of credibility of the process as well as the results, which can convincinglyelaborate the similarities and differences of the political English news delivered byBritish and Chinese media, give a vivid description of the stylistic features of politicalEnglish news as well as a point of view for discriminating the content, purpose and theattitudes in the news, and thus facilitate political English news reading for the readers.