| News as a special discourse plays a role in disseminating information,and reflecting and guiding public opinions.However,the difference in content organization and language strategies between Chinese and American newspapers often leads to diverse perceptions and cognitive biases of audiences towards the same news events.To explore this phenomenon and its causes,the present study selects reports on Huawei by China Daily,Global Times,Washington Post and Wall Street Journal from May to November 2019 as the corpus,and generates semantic networks of both sides with the help of language processing software like WORDij and Gephi.Similarities and differences in news reports between Chinese and American media at this stage are presented clearly after quantitative and qualitative analysis of semantic networks.Moreover,this study attempts to combine pragmatic knowledge with journalism theories from an interdisciplinary perspective to explore the impact of news value standards on semantic network representation.According to the semantic network analysis framework,this study first generates the semantic network diagrams through text processing,and then answers two research questions based on comparative analysis:(1)How are business news reports in China and the United States represented in semantic networks?(2)Are there any significant differences between Chinese and American business news reports in semantic network representation? If any,what are they? Then,network representation is combined with the research context to explore the causes of the differences from the perspective of news value to answer the last research question:(3)What may have caused the differences in semantic network representation between Chinese and American news reports from the perspective of pragmatic strategies?The Chinese and American business news reports are represented intuitively in seven sets of semantic network graphs.After analyzing the similarities and differences of network structures,nodes,links,clusters and subgraphs,it is not difficult to find the differences:(1)As for network structure,the semantic networks representing Chinese media demonstrate a high density around the central node,indicating that Chinese journalists lay more stress on the major news,and thus the semantic consistency of vocabulary in their reports is higher;(2)The differences in degree and weight of the same node and its adjacent words reveal the differences in news content and writing methods.Chinese journalists mainly focus on target news events,while American journalists tend to add political factors to business reports.Concerning writing methods and styles,Chinese news editors emphasize the source of news information frequently to enhance the credibility of information.The American style of writing is relatively free with biased quotations to hurt China’s image.(3)The cluster analysis shows that when reporting Huawei,the US media often connects the company to other enterprises to make comments,while Chinese journalists are likely to focus their stories on Huawei itself instead of confusing different interest groups.The differences in writing patterns formed in the process of combining news content and pragmatic strategies lead to distinctive semantic network representations and they are as follows:(4)American journalists are apt to overuse hedges and avoidance to attack Chinese companies;they are good at using presupposition triggers to add additional information that has nothing to do with the major news,and they take metaphor as an effective way to highlight the prominence and negativity of events.On the contrary,Chinese media tend to choose pragmatic strategies on the basis of maintaining the authenticity of news reports;they pay more attention to the consonance between news position and social values. |
