Structural And Functional Analysis Of Lexical Bundles In English News Reports From China And US Newspapers

Since the middle of the last century,the study of building blocks of discourse,i.e.lexical bundles,has been a hot topic in the field of second language acquisition,foreign language teaching and learning,etc.Studies on lexical bundles in different language modes(i.e.spoken language and written language)and various registers(such as speech(Wang,2009),academic writing(Hyland,2008),textbook(Biber et al.,2004))have been conducted and fruitful results have been made.However,there are much fewer studies of lexical bundles in journalistic register.Friction between China and the US has arisen in recent years due to China-US trade issues,and news media in countries including China and the US have made reports on related issues.This study tends to conduct a contrastive study of lexical bundles in news reports on China-US trade issues from China and US newspapers,exploring the similarities and differences between the use of lexical bundles in the journalistic discourse between the two countries.For this purpose,the present study collects China-US trade related reports respectively fi*om one of the most popular newspapers in China(China Daily)and a well-known newspaper in the US(The New York Times)by setting a date range from January 1,2017 to July 1,2018 for building a corpus of China Daily News Articles consisting of 207 texts and a corpus of The New York Times News Articles composed of 103 texts.Four-word lexical bundles in the two corpora are extracted under certain criteria and classified according to the structural taxonomy of Biber et al.(2004)and functional taxonomy of Biber et al.(2004),and the lexical bundles in China and US news discourse are then analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively from structural and functional perspectives.The findings reveal that in general China Daily employs more lexical bundles than The New York Times does.Structurally,both corpora use a great number of NP/PP-based bundles.Chinese news editors tend to use relatively more VP-based bundles and fewer dependent clause fragments than native news editors,showing a certain degree of oral tendency of the news articles in China Daily.Functionally,the study shows that in both corpora,referential bundles occur more frequently than the other three types of bundles,namely,subject-specific bundles,stance bundles and discourse organizers.The use of abundant quantity referential bundles is a noticeable feature of trade-related news discourse.Lexical bundles across structural types and functional categories in the two corpora show significant difference.L1 transfer,repetition of strings,language input,etc.are in some way likely to interpret why there exist differences between the use of lexical bundles in the two corpora.This study offers some enlightenment to the teaching and research of lexical bundles in news register,textbook construction,and etc.