A Diachronic Study On New Year Editorials Of People’s Daily From The Perspective Of Contextual Adaptation

The New Year Editorial published in People’s Daily on January1stevery year isconsidered as the best way to understand and grasp the Chinese government’s politicaltrends, latest routes and policies in the New Year. So the New Year Editorial of People’sDaily has attracted widespread attention. Up to now, scholars at home and abroad haveconducted researches mainly from the dissemination of journalism and communication,history and cognitive linguistics and made gratifying achievements. However, the aboveresearch perspectives more or less lack universality, compared with Verschueren’slinguistic adaptation theory. In addition, language choice of New Year Editorials ofPeople’s Daily is not a changeless process but a dynamic process changing with thechange of contexts. Therefore, a systematic analysis of New Year Editorials of People’sDaily using linguistic adaptation theory is very necessary.This thesis divides63articles of New Year Editorials of People’s Daily from1949to2012into the following four periods: nascent period of the founding of the new China,tortuous development period, the “Cultural Revolution” period and the latest periodfrom the diachronic perspective with the framework of Verschueren’s linguisticadaptation theory. Subsequently, the author does a thorough research of New YearEditorials in each above-mentioned period from three aspects, namely, the mental world,social world and physical world, combining with history-combing and text-studyingmethod, then clearly outlines the trajectory of the development of Chinese society andhistory in the past half-century, at the same time, sorts out similarities as well asdifferences among New Year Editorials in the four periods, and the development courseof New Year Editorials of People’s Daily from1949to2012.Research results show that the New Year Editorial is a language choice processconducted by a collective. It fully reflects the dynamic adaptation to the mental world,social world and physical world, and it is a language selection activity of complexprocesses and strict procedures, but not a fossil and unchanged linguistic phenomenon.In addition, through the diachronic analysis of New Year Editorials in these four periods,this thesis also reveals that some typical words in New Year Editorials are products of contextual adaptation, and the vitality of these typical words depends on duration inwhich they can adapt to the environment China lies in. Besides this thesis also revealsthat the development process of New Year Editorials keeps pace with tortuous changingprocess of Chinese society and the people’s political psychology as well as tortuouschanging process of China’s development. The three above-mentioned processes are allfrom normality to deformity and then returning to normality.This thesis develops a new perspective and provides beneficial references for thestudy of New Year Editorials of People’s Daily. Of course, this thesis still has somelimitations to be further improved and developed in future studies because of theauthor’s limited capacity and other constraints.