A Corpus-based Study of Discusive Strategies inChinese Housing News Texts〔*〕

Cheng Wenhua,Chen Songsong,2

(1.School of Foreign Studies　Yangtze University,Jingzhou　Hubei　434023;2.School of Foreign Studies and Cultures　Nanjing Normal University,Nanjing　Jiangsu　210097)



A Corpus-based Study of Discusive Strategies inChinese Housing News Texts〔*〕

Cheng Wenhua1,Chen Songsong1,2

(1.School of Foreign StudiesYangtze University,JingzhouHubei434023;2.School of Foreign Studies and CulturesNanjing Normal University,NanjingJiangsu210097)

The present study aims to explore the discursive strategies in Chinese housing news texts on the basis of a self-built corpus.A critical discourse analysis methodology is adopted to explore the implicit meaning and attitudes in the housing texts.The keyword analysis proves to be effective in discovering the lexical features of the texts.The findings show that the news texts remain implicit in their attitudes through the use of professional voice and the direction of readers’ attention.

corpus-based;critical discourse analysis;keywords analysis;housing news texts

Ⅰ.Introduction

The housing issue bears considerable gravity on the national interest as well as the welfare of ordinary people.Directly related to people’s livelihood,hence,the discussion of housing issue shall not restrict itself to the economic domain alone.Rather,more elements,especially social elements should be taken into consideration.The present paper,therefore,intends to employ a critical view to explore the media discourse concerning housing problems.

Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth CDA) is a particularly powerful tool for achieving this purpose,in that CDA sees the use of language as ‘a form of social practice’.〔1〕With their focus on social relations with regard to power and domination,CDA analysts attempts to arouse readers’ critical awareness of language in ideological expressions.However,economic discourse,for instance,the housing discourse,has not been given much attention in CDA work.

In order to find a representative body of the housing texts,the approach of corpus linguistics is employed.This approach is believed to be effective in doing discourse analysis,as Michael Stubbs〔2〕argues that “a much wider range of linguistic features must be studied,since varieties of language use are defined,not by individual features,but by clusters of co-occurring features”.

In brief,along the lines of CDA theories,this paper intends to employ the corpus-based approach to dicover the discursive strategies as well as the underlying meaning embedded in the Chinese housing news texts.This study is hoped to serve as a tentative research combining a corpus research method and CDA theories in investigating social problems revealed in Chinese media texts.

Ⅱ.Theoretical background

1.Critical discourse analysis

Fairclough〔3〕regards ‘critical’ discourse analysis as an approach to foreground links between social practice and language and the systematic investigation of connections between the nature of social processes and properties of language texts.This approach is ‘critical’ in the sense that it sets out to make explicit and to criticize the opaque connections between properties of texts and social processes and relations.

However,CDA has also been criticized for lack of representativeness in the selection of texts for analysis.Koller and Mautner〔4〕points out that the hidden danger of CDA is that the texts singled out for analysis may not be typical in the first place.

Therefore,this paper adopts a corpus-based method so as to discover recurrent linguistic patterns and to secure reliable representativeness.

2.Corpus linguistics and its role in critical discourse analysis

Corpus is a collection of naturally-occurring language text,chosen to characterize a state or variety of a language.〔5〕Though Corpus linguistics and CDA adopt distinctive research methods and orientations,there are two basic concepts of language and research focuses that they agree upon — the constructive role of language in relation to reality and the importance of repeated occurrence of linguistic forms.Previous studies〔6〕have demonstrated that the combination of these two approaches could effectively reduce researcher biases and discover evaluative meanings implicitly shared by the discourse communities.

Ⅲ.The method

1.The housing news corpus

The overall corpus consists of 539 texts which comprise 540,658 characters/302,230 tokens distributed across 14,624 types starting from July 2014 to December 2015.The texts derive from four sources — the government,the press,professionals and experts,and netizens,thus forming four sub-corpora.This reseach is based on the news sub-corpus which consists of 130 texts from major websites and newspapers including www.sina.com,www.163.com,National Business Daily (《每日经济新闻》),Economic Information Daily (《经济参考报》),and so forth.

2.Keyword analysis

In order to reveal the discursive differences of the news texts,a keyword analysis is employed with Wordsmith Tools 4.0.The frequency list of the news sub-corpus is compared against that of the overall corpus.Thus,we can obtain a keyword list,which includes the words that appear significantly more often or less often than the overall corpus.And then,further discussion is made with regard to particular findings.

Ⅳ.Results and discussion

When compared with the frequency list of the overall corpus with a P value less than 0.001,the news sub-corpus yields 222 items,with 109 being negative in keyness.Table 1 lists the top 20 positive keywords and top 20 negative keywords.Further exploration of the unusual frequent (infrequent) items on the keyword list has given rise to several discursive features of the news sub-corpus:

Table 1Keyword list of the news sub-corpus

1.Speak with a professional voice

On the positive side of the keyword list,a number of formal terms,especially technical terms in economics,have been obtained.This points to the use of a professional voice which reports and discusses business events with technical jargons and statistics.In contrast,on the negative part of the list,we can find some informal counterparts,or “lifeworld” counterparts,of the formal terms,which suggests the absence of a lifeworld voice.Lexical items representative of each voice is given below in Table 2.

Table 2Professional voice vs. lifeworld voice

The use of professional voice serves two purposes.One of them is to help establish an objective and authoritative image of the press.In terms of lexical choice,the texts incorporate a number of technical terms to exhibit his professional knowledge,such as “同比”,“数据” and “成交”.The other purpose of using a professional voice is to help the writer to be free from any value judgment.A professional voice provides a “safe” way of reporting so as not to provoke any discomfort in readers.

2.Frequently refer to insiders and experts

The keyword list reveals a set of lexical items that are often adopted for presenting ideas or attitudes,such as“表示” (224),“认为” (198),“称”(91),and “透露” (40).And further concordance observations lead to the following sequence:

indicate (“表示”)

People/institute/research center + think (“认为”)

remark (“称”)

disclose (“透露”)

The frequent reference to insiders or experts in the property field could,to some extent,strengthen the professionalism and help convince readers of the reliability of the news reports.But the problem with heavy quotes is that the media may have discriminated the viewpoints offered by those so-called insiders and experts who may provide misleading information to the public through the media outlets.In the meantime,the viewpoints of the press have also been left implicit.

3.Topic control

With an established fame of objectivity and authority,the press is capable of undertaking the role of topic control.Its professional voice attracts public attention to the latest real estate market information,as indicated by the frequent occurrence of the themes related to property transactions,price fluctuations,and financial policies,as exemplified by the positive keywords in Table 1.But,in contrast with that,attention to the people’s livelihood has been understated.Investigation of the corpus data shows that the frequencies of those words concerning low-income housing projects are fairly low in the news sub-corpus.Their detailed distributions are given below in Table 3.

As shown in Table 3,these items not only have fairly low frequencies,but also appear in a limited number of texts.According to the communication theory of agenda-setting,〔7〕the media is capable of setting the ‘agenda’ for public concerns by attaching different degrees of importance to certain issues.Corpus data,accordingly,have shown the unequal weight of different concerns in the housing market.

Table 3Distributions of the lexical items concerning low-income projects

Ⅴ.Conclusion

News reports,which are distributed through major mass communication channels,outweigh the other types of texts in terms of communication scale,intensity,and influence.We have found that a professional voice is prevailing in this kind of texts so as to maintain an objective and authoritarian position.Attitudes,therefore,are embedded by directing readers’ attention to certain events or remarks so as to influence their understanding of the market.

This CDA-inspired corpus study has revealed various discursive strategies and important attitudes in the housing news texts.Furthermore,it has provided a fresh methodology for using Chinese corpus in the study of social issues.However,due to the constraint of time and resources,the corpus data may not be large enough to cover all the important topics and events in the real world.The future expanded research could adopt a more thorough sampling method based on the present study,and enlarge the corpus data to a wider coverage.

〔1〕Fairclough,Norman,Discourse and Social Change,Cambridge:Polity,1992,p.63.

〔2〕 Stubbs M.,Whorf’s Children:Critical comments on Critical Discourse Analysis CDA,Evolving models of language,Clevedon:BAAL in association with Multilingual Matters,1997,pp.100-116.

〔3〕 Koller V.,Mautner G.,Computer Applications in Critical Discourse Analysis,Applying English Grammar:Corpus and Functional Approaches,London:Arnold,2004,pp.216-228.

〔4〕 Fairclough N.,Media Discourse,London:Edward Arnold,1995,p.96.

〔5〕 Sinclair J.,Corpus,concordance,collocation,Oxford:Oxford University Press,1991,p.171.

〔6〕 Baker P.et al., A useful methodological synergy?Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press, Discourse & Society, Vol.19, No.3, 2008, pp. 273-306.

〔7〕 McCombs M.,Shaw D.,The agenda-setting function of mass media,Public opinion quarterly,Vol.36,No.2,1972,pp.176-187.

About the authors：Cheng Wenhua,M.A.,lecturer in the School of Foreign Studies,Yangtze University,research fields:corpus linguistics,language teaching;Chen Songsong,Ph.D candidate of Nanjing Normal University,lecturer in the School of Foreign Studies,Yangtze University,research fields:cognitive linguistics,neurolinguistics.

〔*〕This paper is supported by the Teaching Research Project of Yangtze University “Research on the Backwash Effects of Changes in CET Question Types”(JY2014041) and “Research on Assessment for Learning in Foreign Language Teaching” (JY2014040) and the 12th Five-Year Plan Project of Hubei Educational Science “Formative Assessment of University English Teachers in Hubei”.