Linguistic Features of the Headlines of the News Report in China Daily and Washington Post.docx

linguistic features of the headlines of the news report in china daily and washington postabstract：this paper presents an analytical study of the linguistic features of the news report headlines of china daily and washington post at lexical, sentential and rhetoric levels. to conduct this study, the author collected 100 news report headlines from the two newspapers. statistical analysis generated the following findings: first, china daily and washington post do not vary too much in the use of verbs, nouns and adjectives. china daily uses more simple verbs, proper nouns, abbreviations and acronyms while washington post uses more verb phrases. few adjectives were found in the headlines of china daily and washington post. however, the headlines in china daily use acronyms like us and un while washington post refers them as u.s. and u.n. in its headlines. besides, washington post capitalizes every content word but china daily does not. second, the length of news headlines of china daily and washington post are both short. on average, the news headlines in china daily have an average of 6.4 words whereas the headlines in washington post have an average of 6.8 words. both china daily and washington post employ almost the same amount of elliptical sentences and complete sentences.finally, both china daily and washington post favor many popular rhetorical devices in their news report headlines. washington post uses more alliteration in headlines. china daily adopts more metaphors. china daily and washington post both use rhyme and metonymy in the headlines to impress on the readers. it is hoped that the study can shed light on the linguistic features of the news report headlines of china daily and washington post and also provide help to learner writers in news english.key words: news report headlines china daily washington post中国日报和华盛顿邮报新闻句型对比研究摘要: 本文着重从词汇、句法以及修辞方面分析和比较中国日报和华盛顿邮报新闻标题的语言特点。本文作者从中国日报和华盛顿邮报收集了100条各类新闻标题。数据分析的结果如下：首先，中国日报和华盛顿邮报的新闻标题在动词，名词以及形容词的使用上没有明显的区别。中国日报的新闻标题使用的简单动词，专有名词，缩略词以及首字母缩略词多于华盛顿邮报，而华盛顿邮报的新闻标题使用的动词词组多于中国日报。两者的标题内都很少用形容词。但是中国日报使用像us和un等一些首字母缩略词，华盛顿邮报却用：u.s.和u.n.。此外，华盛顿邮报标题内每个实词的首字母都大写，而中国日报没有。其次，中国日报和华盛顿邮报新闻标题的长度都很短。中国日报新闻标题的平均长度只有6.4个单词，而华盛顿邮报只有6.8个单词。中国日报和华盛顿邮报的新闻标题在省略句和完整句使用数量上几乎相等。最后，中国日报和华盛顿邮报都在新闻标题内使用修辞手法。华盛顿邮报的新闻标题使用的头韵手法比中国日报的新闻标题多。而中国日报的新闻标题使用的暗喻手法比华盛顿邮报的新闻标题多。此外，两者的新闻标题都采用尾韵和借代的手法以加深读者对新闻标题的印象。本文作者衷心希望此论文的分析结果能便于了解中国日报和华盛顿邮报新闻标题特点以及给新闻英语的学习者提供帮助。关键词：英语新闻标题 中国日报 华盛顿邮报1. introduction1.1 introduction to china daily and washington postchina daily, established in 1981, is the only national english-language newspaper in china. the average daily circulation is more than 200,000, one-third of which is abroad in more than 150 countries and regions. its website receives 6 million page views a day, two-thirds from overseas. china daily is regarded as one of the countrys most authoritative english media outlets and an important source of information on chinese politics, economy, society and culture. it is often called the voice of china or window to china. china daily also serves as an important source for high-end chinese readers who want to know more about the world. washington post, established in 1877, is the most influential and oldest newspaper in washington d.c, even throughout the world. the average daily circulation is more than 500,000, making it the fifth biggest newspaper in the world. washington post provides us information on politics, economy, society and culture of american and the other countries.1.2 function of news report headlines the term headline refers to the sentence(s) in the leading position of the news reportthe words that will be read first or that are positioned to draw the most attention. research (bovee & arens, 1992, p. 294) has shown that, on average, there are three to five times as many people reading the headline as those reading the body copy. a headline has numerous functions. first of all, the headline must attract attention to the report quickly. it should take only a few seconds to capture the readers attention. otherwise, the entire message may be lost. a headline also selects the reader, that is, it tells whether what the news wants to convey interests the reader. the idea is to engage and involve the reader, suggesting a reason to read the rest of the report. therefore, the headline is the most important in a news report.1.3 rationale of the studywe live in a world of news. the tides of english news reports have their own linguistic features. a headline is the brief summary of the main idea of a news report. in order to attract readers attention, a headline should be vivid, novel and interesting, and the usage of lexical, sentential and rhetorical devices can make it more eye-catching.surprisingly, however, although there has been voluminous research done on the features of news report titles, the present writer has found few reported studies on the comparison of the language features of the headlines of the news reports in china daily and washington post.the present study was designed to fill this gap in research. it will analyze and compare the linguistic features of the headlines of the news reports in china daily and washington post from the lexical, sentential and rhetoric aspects. hopefully, through my analysis and research on the linguistic features of news report headlines of the two famous newspapers, we can gain a better understanding of the features of the news report headlines.2. literature reviewthere are numerous studies on the english newspaper headlines. some scholars are inclined to study the lexical characteristics of the news report headlines, while others prefer to analyze their grammatical features. still some would like to study the rhetoric aspect. many of them combine the features of the headlines with translation. han (2006) makes a research on the stylistic features of english political news headlines. as a kind of serious news style, political news typically reports important national or global events. she concludes that english political news headlines normally embody various stylistic features in terms of lexes, structures and rhetoric, for instance, the use of small words, ellipsis, figures of speech and pun etc. and she analyzes the stylistic features of english political news headlines with examples in detail.duanmu (2001) studies the function and the language features of the english newspaper headlines. he analyzes the features of the english newspaper headlines in terms of punctuation, syntax, the use of words and rhetoric devices. according to duanmu, english newspaper headlines prefer comma, colon, semicolon, question mark, quotation marks and exclamation mark when using punctuation. besides, english newspaper headlines often use short words, shortenings (acronyms and clippings) and idioms. furthermore, rhetoric devices such as figure of speech, allusion, and antithesis are frequently used in english newspaper headlines. the headline is an important component of news with peculiar language features. feng (1999) makes a preliminary survey on the peculiarities of the vocabulary and grammar of the english newspaper headlines, focusing mainly on the lexical and grammatical aspects. he comes to the conclusion that the english newspaper headlines prefer short words, omission of some words and wide use of abbreviations and acronyms. in addition, he analyzes the tense of english newspaper headlines in terms of four aspects, namely, simple present tense, present progressive tense, simple future tense, and the passive voice.duanand and li (2002) focus on the stylistic characteristics of the headlines of english newspaper. they analyze the uses of vocabulary, syntax and rhetoric characteristics of english news headlines so as to provide a better understanding of the contents of headlines and western culture.li (2000)investigates the grammatical and rhetoric characteristics of the headlines of the english language press. in his paper, the uses of vocabulary and tenses, the omission of words, types and rhetoric characteristics of the headlines in the english language press are approached for the purpose of having a better understanding of the contents of headlines and improving of press readability.chen (2006) provides an in-depth analysis of the features of headlines of journalistic english. she identifies six characteristics of the headlines of journalistic english: omission, acronym and clipping, the usage of tenses, rhetoric and punctuation.zhen (2005) attempts to study the linguistic and rhetoric peculiarities of english newspaper headlines. he draws our attention to the features of the english newspaper headlines such as omission; acronym and clipping, simplification of tense, use of punctuations and idioms.huang (1994) focuses her research on the use of rhetoric in the newspaper titles and emphasizes on the function of the rhetoric devices. she comes to the conclusion that the usage of the rhetoric devices adds vividness and readability to the report. in addition, some scholars have studied the headline features of china daily and washington post respectively. hu and liu (2006) have investigated the rhetoric characteristics of washington post in order to get an overall idea of the rhetoric features of the english news report headlines. washington post embodies the rhetoric traits of the news report headlines in terms of alliteration, assonance and alternate rhyme, oxymoron, metonymy, climax, satirize, parody, figures of speech, personification, and ellipse. yang and nan (1994) concentrate on the stylistic features of the headlines of china daily in terms of short words, abbreviations and acronyms and tenses.guan and wei (2005) make a deep study on the functional textual analysis of the english news reports in china daily. they believe that the functional textual analysis of english news in newspapers can further deepen our understanding of news english. based on the model of functional textual analysis of halliday, the paper analyzes three pieces of randomly selected english news in china daily from the perspectives of context of situation, context of culture, lexical density, grammatical complexity, transitivity structure, mood structure, thematic structure, thematic progression pattern, graphical characteristics, and syntactical characteristics.the studies mentioned above have touched many aspects of the newspaper report headlines. although some of them research on the headline features of china daily or washington post, pitifully no one of them compare the headline features of these two newspapers. this paper will draw both merits and lessons from previous research and compare the linguistic features of the headlines of the news reports in china daily and washington post at the lexical, sentential and rhetoric levels so as to give readers a thorough and unbiased view of the features of the news reports of the two newspapers, thus assisting correspondents to write the news report headlines and providing help to green hands in news english. 3. methodology3.1 data all the headlines studied in this paper were taken from china daily and washington post issued this year. in order to get valuable information for the study, a corpus of 100 headlines was built. for the sake of comparability, most of the headlines chosen are politics-related. moreover the titles i collected from china daily and washington post report the same events. besides, i also refer to some related materials about the linguistic features of the headlines of china daily and washington post. 3.2 framework of analysisbased on the research findings of some scholars and the data i collected, i categorized the features of the headlines into three aspects: the lexical, sentential and rhetorical levels. first, i analyzed and compared the uses of verbs, nouns, adjectives, abbreviation and acronyms in china daily and washington post. second, i approached the sentence level of china daily and washington mainly in terms of elliptical sentence and complete sentences. third, i summed up the rhetoric characteristics of the headlines of china daily and washington post mainly in terms of rhyme, alliteration, metaphor and metonymy.3.3 procedures data analysisin order to conduct a data-driven study, i first collected 50 headlines respectively from china daily and washington post, then identified and compared their linguistic features, marked them in different colors, counted the frequencies, and eventually drew a reasonable conclusion. the procedure is as follows:3.3.1 identification identification of sentence patternas for sentence structure, there are seven basic sentence patterns (zhang, 2003), e.g. sv: the birds sang.sva: she drove at full speed svc: he looked angry.svo: i bought a book.svoio: i bought my sister a book.svoa: they sent the parcel by airmail.svoc: they elected him captain.sentences in which part of their structure has been omitted are elliptical sentences. otherwise they are complete sentences. for example, a. cancer expected to skyrocket in asia (elliptical sentence)b. putin attacks west ahead of g-8 summit (complete sentence) identification of rhetoric devices1) rhymerhyme is the use of words that end with the same sound in order to generate the rhythm which impresses on readers. for example, spring, the sweet spring, is the years pleasant king. the sentence repeats the syllable ing at the end of words three times to produce the rhythm.2) alliterationalliteration is the use of words that begin with the same sound in order to make a special communicative effect. for instance, what went wrong with bearingpo in? the sentence repeats the consonant /w/ at the beginning of words three times.3) metaphoraccording to feng (1995), a metaphor is in a sense a condensed simile, differing from the latter only in form and artistry. in a simile, the words like, as, asso are used to make the comparison, as in jim was as cunning as a fox. in a metaphor, however, the comparison would appear simply as jim was a fox. metaphors have three main uses: descriptive, illuminative and illustrative.4) metonymymetonymy (feng, 1995) is a figure of speech that has to do with the substitution of the name of one thing for that of another. this substituted name may be an attribute of other thing or be closely associated with it. in other words, it involves a “change of name,” the substituted name suggesting the thing meant. for example, scepter and crown must tumble down. in the second form, a proper name is made to stand for an idea or characteristics associated with the name, e.g. solomon is for a wise man and daniel for a wise and fair judge. 4. comparison of lexical features of the headlines of the news report in china daily and washington postin order to make the information accessible to readers effectively, the choice of words in news report headline is very cautious and skillful. the aim of the journalist is quite specific. he wishes to capture the attention of readers and by means of impressive words to persuade them to read the reports. both linguistic and psychological aspects are taken into consideration in his choice of words. table 1. comparison of the amount of verbs, nouns and adjectives in the headlines of china daily and washington postchina dailywashington postnumberratenumberratetotal words320100%348 100%verbs56 17.5%60 17.24%nouns170 53.13%184 52.87%adjectives21 6.56%21 6.04%as can been seen from table 1 that china daily and washington post do not vary too much in the use of verbs, nouns and adjectives. sharing the same purposeto familiarize the readers with or remind the readers of the events happening every day- the techniques used at the lexical level of china daily and washington post do not have obvious differences. 4.1 verbstable 2. comparison of verbs in the headlines of china daily and washington post china dailywashington postnumberratenumberrateverbs56100%60100%simple verbs3867.86%4473.3%vp1832.14%1626.7%it can be seen from table 2 that both china daily and washington post are in favor of using simple verbs and simple verb phrases. however, china daily uses less simple verbs than washington post while washington post uses less verb phrases than china daily. the reason is probably that simple words enable readers to understand the headline more easily and thus grab the readers attention while still keeping vividness. in addition, since the subjects and events involved in news reports vary from simple to complex, shared knowledge by the addresser (reporter) and addressee (the reader) varies. for example, knowledge of techniques sometimes demands high educational background or special interests in a certain field. to convey different knowledge clearly, the reporter doesnt always use the same expressions in his headlines. so the news report trying to win readers must be careful when selecting words. 4. 2 adjectivesadjectives, as emotive and exciting words, are used to better depict the fact or the development of an event. the adjectives used in headlines are either descriptive or evaluative. though in headlines few adjectives are used, i could find out that reporters usually prefer simple adjectives.table 3. comparison of adjectives in the headlines of china daily and washington post china dailywashington postnumberratenumberratetotal words320100%348100%adjectives216.56%216.04%table 3 lists the use of adjectives in china daily and washington post headlines. obviously, both china daily and washington post headlines u