| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 華語文教學系 === 101 === In order to explore the differences between Chinese and Arabian cultures from a linguistic and cultural point of view, this research has chosen to analyze the online news from Taiwanese and Arabian news station websites, specifically on the demise of Kim Jong-il, Steve Jobs, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein as linguistic data. The research analyzes the differences between Chinese and Arabic narrative structure, transitivity, discourse representation and word association using the key term extraction method from Tseng (1997), taking into consideration the narrative structure model from Labov (1972), Theory of Transitivity from Halliday (1985) and the way Fairclough (1995) categorized reporting speech.
The results show that Chinese tends to describe the events before the death, while Arabic tends to describe the events after the death. Also, Chinese tends to centre around “people”, while Arabic tends to centre around “events”. Besides, the source of information for Chinese news mostly comes from USA, while for Arabic news, the sources are distributed across USA and other parts of the world. Furthermore, in news related to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, Chinese places emphasis on the positive images of USA, while Arabic hints at multiple incidences at the notion that the actions from USA were unjustified.
The above findings support the following characteristics of Chinese and Arabic languages and cultures: Firstly, Chinese is past oriented while Arabic is future oriented; secondly, Chinese is subject-oriented thinking mode while Arabic is object-oriented thinking mode; lastly, Chinese is pro-American culture while Arabic is anti-American culture. According to these findings, this thesis provides a sample of news reading as a future reference for teaching and learning of Chinese.
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