A comparative study of business journalism style in 'Malaysian business and management today' : a functional textual approach

• Main Author: Ali, Afida Mohamad
• Published: Lancaster University 2005
• Subjects: 070.486
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.435869

Objectives: Studies on written business texts have focused mainly on specialized business lexis and less on their semantic and pragmatic properties. This thesis explores the business journalism style of Malaysian Business (MB) and Management Today (MT) from a functional text-linguistic perspective. The work is situated in an L 1/L2 contrastive framework and in the context of Language for Special Purposes (LSP) where a subject-specific text (an LSP text) is always a text with a pragmatic function. Hence, the focus is on the relation between the text and the intentions present in its propositional content. The study uses Hengst's LSP communicative act framework and Hoey's Problem-Solution textual pattern to analyse the writers' communicative functions and how they go about relaying those intentions. Method: The study adopts a corpus-based approach and the analysis is based on a corpus of Malaysian Business and Management Today, consisting of 50 feature articles from each magazine on business in Malaysia and the UK, respectively. The corpus tools used are WMatrix and the Multilingual Corpus Tool Kit (MLCT). Drawing on the two theoretical frameworks, the methodology included searches for significant communicative functions, lexico-grammatical patterns encoded in those communicative functions, semantic fields in the Problem/Solution patterns and also the speech acts underlying the Problem/Solution categories. Results: MT is more informal in journalistic style than MB. MB and MT also show a significant difference in the use of communicative acts, e.g. Evaluating, Imperatives, Explicating, Making Concessions, Predicting and Comparing. Overlapping of two communicative acts may occur, suggesting that the identification of these acts is not a straightforward matter. There is also a higher occurrence of Solutions as compared to Problems in MB and MT. Key semantic fields were found for Problem and Solution clauses in MB and MT compared with a normative corpus. Findings showed that the Problem and the Solution clauses carry various subsidiary communicative acts in both MB and MT. Implications: Importance should be placed on the analysis of fixed sequences of communicative acts underlying the various patterns of Problem/Solution by exploring other types of corpus tools. Further research should be done on written business journalistic discourse by non-native discourse communities in order to examine differences in style, dominant communicative acts and new business terminologies indicating a Problem or Solution. There should be a move of some of the resources and expertise that exists in English for Special Purposes (ESP) to lesser understood professional languages.