| As human society steps into the Era of Information with expanded development of mass media, the daily life is closely bound up with news reports and commentaries. Undoubtedly, the news discourse has become the most influential type of form which permeates every social institution and serves as a carrier of information dissemination.Economic review discourse is a sub-genre of news commentary discourse and it takes various forms in media, mainly in the form of special column, free-lancer articles and the like. The news commentary differs essentially from the news report in the use of language form. It is the argumentative, i.e., the thesis-like language that the news commentary adopts and it is a way to generate the intrinsic properties and discipline of things by using abstract methods and to get the ultimate scientific results through judging and reasoning. Therefore, just because of its characteristics of abstractness and generality, the understanding of commentary sentences appears to be especially vital for the readers. And by digging some studies about this type of text, the author finds that most previous studies of news commentary like economic reviews focus either on the language and lexical features from a micro-level or on the textual structure analysis from a macro perspective. However, to explore the sentence meaning in this type of text by taking the sentence as a proposition and examining the truth value and conditions of it is almost a new and untouched field. Hence, this paper attempts to analyze the sentence meaning in the economic review discourse on the basis of truth-conditional semantics. The study of sentence meaning is the core of sentential semantics. Sentential semantics is a key branch of semantics which takes sentence as a complete unit to study its meaning and the very relations between each unit. There are some principal theories concerning sentence meaning, i.e., Behaviorist Theory of Meaning, Verificationist Theory of Meaning from Logic Empiricism, Truth-conditional Semantics from Donald Davidson and the Conceptual Role Semantics advocated by Wilfrid Sellars, Gilbert Harman and Ned Block, etc. The present paper, however, studies the sentence meaning of economic review text from Donald Davidson’s truth-conditional theory.From a logical perspective, sentence meaning is related to the truth-condition of propositions. A statement is viewed as a proposition, and to judge whether this proposition is true or false entails the exploration of its truth conditions. The sentences in the news commentary are the results gained from judgment and reasoning of abstract concepts; hence, the understanding of those sentences entails the judgment of a proposition.Taking the current economic phenomenon as the departure point, this thesis chooses three representative economic reviews from the notable economic newspaper---Financial Times as samples. These three reviews focus on the same topic and are written by different commentators. It seeks to employ the Truth-conditional Theory of Meaning to analyze the propositional relations of the discourse as well as the truth conditions of propositions. It is hoped that by this logic analyzation a more accurate and scientific way of understanding commentary sentences can be found to avoid ambiguity and misperception. |
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