Assignment #5

For my analysis, I chose an article from BBC News online (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4781586.stm)
that spoke about an article in the China Daily; I compared this article with the actual article from China Daily (http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2006-03/07/content_527423.htm). The China Daily article praised Ang Lee's award for Best Director, while also speculating that political motives could have been why his movie did not win for Best Movie. The BBC News article criticized the China Daily for leaving out part of Lee's speech in their article.

While BBC News presented the facts of the situation, then followed it by the reporter's opinion, China Daily relied on quotes from a variety of individuals to convey the meaning of the article. This quality made it appear as if China Daily was attempting to make it seem like the reporter's views were shared by many across the country. As a result of this method, the China Daily article contained much more coreferring expressions than the BBC News article. In speech, coreferring expressions should be more common than in text, as these expressions are a sign of the speaker's confidence that he has established common ground with his listener. Another reason for the abundance of coreferring expressions in the China Daily article can be attributed to the fact that since the newspaper is based overseas, the author of the article was probably unfamiliar with the conventions of English text. Possibly, he did not realize that it is crucial not to aim for efficiency or to assume common ground when addressing a wide audience through news articles.

For example, BBC News wrote that "Lee's film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which won the best foreign language film Oscar in 2001, did well at the international box office but not in China." In the next sentence, rather than continuing with "he", the author refers to Lee as "The 51-year-old director". In contrast, the China Daily article writes that "Sai Ren, a film critic with CCTV6, a film channel, noted that Lee's achievement had little to do with Chinese cinema. He suggested that people watch the show just to enjoy it." In this situation, the "he" and "it" are very unclear.