A Comparative Study On Lexical Chunks In Catastrophic English News Reports From China And America

In recent years, more and more researchers devote themselves to the study of the phenomenon of lexical chunk. Many researches have been done from different aspects. Some researchers investigate the nature, classifications, and characteristics of lexical chunk. Some other researchers do corpus-based studies of lexical chunk. For example, they study the lexical chunks used in business letters, newspapers, and so on. Meanwhile, some researchers probe into the influence of lexical chunk in language learning and teaching. However, the comparative study of lexical chunks in catastrophic English news reports from China and America are relative few. This paper tries to do such a research.The corpus used in this study are 30 catastrophic English news reports from China Daily and 30 catastrophic English news reports from New York Times related to the event of the missing plane MH370 on March 8th, 2014.This research adopts the classification of lexical chunk by Nattinger and De Carrico(2000). And lexical chunks are divided into four types, that is, polyword, phrasal constraint, sentence builder, and institutionalized expression. Through study, some results have been achieved. Firstly, in terms of proportion and frequency, the ranks of the four types of lexical chunks in China Daily are phrasal constraint, polyword, sentence builder, and institutionalized expression. Secondly, the ranks of proportion and frequency in New York Times show the same results as that in China Daily. From the highest to the lowest are also phrasal constraint, polyword, sentence builder, and institutionalized expression. Thirdly, no significant differences have been found between the two newspapers, whether the total numbers of lexical chunks or each type of lexical chunks.Meanwhile, some implications can be gained from this study. Whether for the readers or for the writers of catastrophic English news reports, they should pay more attention to the use of lexical chunk, especially the frequently-used type of lexical chunks. This will benefit the reading and writing of catastrophic English news reports a lot.