A Comparative Analysis Of Chinese And American Editorials-Perspective From Systemic Functional Grammar

Newspaper, which enables us to keep update on world events is the most traditional and effective channel to get information. And known as the "spirit of news media", editorial plays an important role in newspaper. Editorial is one kind of commentaries, different from the ordinary commentary articles, editorial always represents the standpoint of the newspaper, or even the political party behind to make authoritative and solemn comments. And the editorials from some influential newspapers will attract world-wide mass media’s attention.Editorial also draws the attention of scholars. Most researches on editorial are conducted from the perspective of journalism, while few are from that of linguistics, not to mention the contrastive study of editorial in the Chinese and English languages. And far less are the study of editorials and the social and cultural elements through discourse analysis. This thesis analyzes the editorials in two different languages contrastively, which is not only helpful for readers to grasp the different styles of writing but also contributes to understanding the different language structures by virtue of the interpretation of the social and cultural factors behind the languages.Halliday believes the functions of language can be abstracted into three categories, which are also labeled as metafunctions. To fulfill the purpose of exchanging information, people will select the proper words and expressions according to different demands. Hence, in systemic functional grammar system,"choice" is an indispensable concept. By choosing linguistic mode from different subsystems, the features of the discourse will be prominent. The thesis adopts systemic functional theory in the contrastive analysis of editorials in People s Daily and Washington Post. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches are used to ensure the reliability of the analysis. The analysis first focuses on the comparison of certain function, and then compares the similarities and differences on this level of function based on the statistical data. The social and cultural elements contribute to the similarities and differences are illustrated at last. The analysis on ideational function centers on transitivity system; the part of interpersonal function focuses on mood and modality system; and thematic structure and cohesion are discussed in the part of textual function. by comparison of the three functions, it will not only discover the similarities of the linguistic modes of the editorials in the two languages, but also reveal the differences, so as to further discuss the social and cultural elements behind the differences.