A Comparative Study of English and Japanese News Discourse - A Cross-Cultural Perspective

本文报告了2003-4学年科学研究资助项目（No.15520374）“英语和日语新话语的比较研究——跨文化视角”的研究结果。本文从跨文化交际和理解的角度对英语和日语报纸语篇进行了研究。在这样做的过程中，论文特别关注捕鲸的主题，这是文化负载，因此与调查的目的有关。在第一章对研究进行了总体介绍之后，第二章讨论了研究的理论背景，其中包括目前在新闻语篇分析中非常有影响力的批评性话语分析（Critical Discourse Analysis， CDA）。第三章是对两类语篇的实际分析；首先，第3.1章比较和对比了英国和日本报纸上关于捕鲸的新闻社论，并声称各自报纸的编辑使用非常不同的策略来说服读者出于不同的原因。第3.2章分析了一份英国报纸上关于捕鲸和鳕鱼捕捞的两种不同类型的论述，并报道了对这两个话题的处理方式有很大的不同，这取决于它们是否与国家的文化和经济密切相关。第4章介绍了两类调查问卷的结果，首先，对特定主题具有不同文化假设和知识的读者对新闻社论的看法（4.1），其次，对主题的不同文化假设和先验知识如何影响读者对文本的解释（4.2）。研究结果显示了两者之间的明确联系。第五章总结了本研究并讨论了其对语言教育学的启示。文章最后提出了进一步研究的建议。

This paper reports the result of research entitled 'A Comparative Study of English and Japanese New Discourse - A Cross-Cultural Perspective', which was conducted with the support of the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (No.15520374) in the academic years 2003-4. It investigated English and Japanese newspaper discourse from the perspective of cross-cultural communication and understanding. In so doing, the paper focused specifically on the topic of whaling, which is culturally loaded and thus relevant to the purpose of the investigation.After a general introduction to the research in Chapter 1,Chapter 2 discusses theoretical backgrounds to the study, including Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA), which is currently very influential in the analysis of news discourse. Chapter 3 introduces actual analyses of two types of discourse; firstly, Chapter 3.1 compares and contrasts news editorials on whaling in both British and Japanese newspapers and claims that editors in the respective newspapers utilize very different strategies to persuade readers for different causes. Chapter 3.2 analyses two different types of discourse on whaling and cod-fishing in a British newspaper and reports that the treatment of the topics is drastically different depending on whether they are closely related to the country's culture and economy. Chapter 4 introduces the results of two types of questionnaires which were conducted to investigate, firstly, the perception of news editorials by readers with differing cultural assumptions and knowledge on a specific topic (4.1), and secondly, how different cultural assumptions and prior knowledge on a topic affect readers' interpretations of a text (4.2). The results have shown a clear connection between the two. Chapter 5 summarizes the study and discusses its implications for language pedagogy. The paper concludes with suggestions for further investigation.