从中国日报和时代周刊看中西报刊语言的异同

On the Language Differences in Magazines Between East and West: a Comparative Study of China Daily and

Times

从中国日报和时代周刊看中西报刊语言的异同

Abstract

This paper illustrates the artistic expressive effects of the difference by analyzing Chinese-English newspaper China daily and English-English newspaper Times. In order to improve the quality of non-native English newspapers, and make them learn from each other by culture inclusiveness.

In addition, examination of differences between Chinese English texts and native English texts not only facilitates intercultural communication between China and other countries, especially English-speaking countries in the world, but also brings some insights to the wide spread of English in China and further recognition and standardization of newspaper’s writing.

Key words：Contrastive writing patterns；rhetorical patterns; Newspaper text

摘要

本文旨在从文体学的角度阐述英语报刊文章的语言特色, 从而为报刊语言的发展，报纸的形式以及中国文化下的报刊可以向西方报刊值得借鉴的东西提供一些参考。此外，报刊的阅读对写作水平也有一定的提高，通过对两份报纸的比较，找出写作的一些重要信息。

关键词：写作方式对比研究；修饰模式；新闻报刊

CONTENTS

Chapter1 Introduction (1)

1.1Background I nformation (1)

1.2Research Q uestions (2)

Chapter 2 A Contrastive Analysis of Articles between China daily and Times (3)

2.1 Rhetoric A pplication (4)

2.2 Language Difference (5)

2.3 Paragraph Development (6)

Chapter3 Implication for Chinese-English newspaper and Native English Newspaper (9)

3.1 Implications for Intercultural Communication (10)

3.2Implications for Contrastive Text Studies (11)

3.3 Implications for EFL Pedagogy (12)

Chapter 4 Conclusion (13)

References (14)

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Background Information

The globalization of English in the past few decades helps to promote a dramatically increasing number of English learners and users in China. Additionally, in recent years more and more English newspapers and magazines are released by various Chinese organizations and societies, which greatly facilities China’s international communi cation. In the academic circle, scholars advocate that on maintaining the common core of international English, each nation should keep its own national identity, for language is not only the carrier of culture, but also part of culture. This fact, however, serves that on adopting the international formula of English, English texts under different cultural backgrounds also maintain their own writing traditions. This phenomenon can also be interpreted by the contrastive rhetoric hypothesis that there exist preferred rhetorical styles within text, which are specific to cultural-linguistic communities. The founder of contrastive rhetoric, American applied linguist Robert Kaplan (1966:13) stated that language and writing are culture specific, and therefore it varies from culture to culture and even from time to time within a given culture. The difference in rhetoric reflects the mainstream writing conventions unique to each culture Contrastive rhetoric is a field of inquiry that focuses on the different writing conventions of text. Although originally proposed as a pedagogical solution to the problem of second language (L2) organizational structures,

contrastive rhetoric has seen a significant growth as an independent discipline with continuous modifications and perfections having been made in the past four decades. During the 1980s, the development of research approaches, such as text linguistics and discourse analysis, helped to improve the methodological orientation of contrastive rhetoric research (Enkvist, 1987; Leki, 1991). As a result, researchers have begun to study organizational structures of both first language (L1) and L2 written discourse more vigorously and systematically (Martin, 1992), and contrastive rhetoric has come to be defined in a broader term, encompassing more than just the organizational structures (Conner, 1996; Ostler, 1996).

The contrastive rhetoric study between the Chinese and English writings has also witnessed a flourish in the past forty years. However, most of the researches have been conducted either between Chinese texts and English texts or between Chinese English as a foreign language (EFL) students’ English compositions and native English-speaking students’compositions. Few comparisons have been made between “accomplished”English texts written by Chinese-speaking writers and English-speaking writers. Besides, newspaper argumentative articles, a major mass media genre which bears a great influence upon both the general public and the academic circle, have not been adequately studied. Addressing some