新闻话语对读者的影响.docx

News Discourse and Its Influence on Readers Kumiko Murata This paper investigates the ways in which readers interpret a news editorial on the basis of cultural assumptions formulated partly under the influence of the media they are associated with.The result shows that in the case of the English version, the majority of the non-Japanese respondents were anti-whaling, while most of the Japanese version respondents (Japanese) were either neutral or pro-whaling. The English respondents overwhelmingly supported the editor’s anti-whaling stance despite pointing out the excessive use of emotive language. By contrast, most of the Japanese respondents showed strong disagreement with the editor’s attitude, pointing out the lack of evidence and information. Although the result does not necessarily show that this single editorial had a direct influence on the respondents, there are nonetheless some indications of the ways in which na?ve readers could be influenced by the media. Finally, the paper discusses implications of this study for language pedagogy. This paper is an attempt to investigate the relationship between readers’ cultural assumptions, beliefs and values and their interpretation and perception of news discourse, focusing specifically on the British press. News discourse has been extensively studied in the past by commentators, for example, from the perspective of media and sociolinguistics (Bell, 1991; Bell Garrett, 1998), of critical linguistics (Fowler, 1991; Fowler, Hodge, Kress Trew, 1979; Hodge Kress, 1993; Simpson, 1993; Trew, 1979), of critical linguistics and social theory (Fairclough, 1989, 1992, 1995a, 1995b, 1998, 2000), and of social cognition (van Dijk, 1988, 1993, 1996, 1998). Their approach, however, is not free from limitations, and it has been critically scrutinized mainly for the inadequacy of the linguistic analysis. In particular, there has been strong criticism of the analysis of limited lexical items and grammatical features, which are se