A Corpus-based Study on Lexical Features of English News Reports on 2014 Beijing APEC大学生毕业论文.docVIP

PAGE PAGE 19 A Corpus-based Study on Lexical Features of English News Reports on 2014 Beijing APEC 1.Introduction 1.1 The background significance of the study Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) is a forum for 21 Pacific Rim member economies that promotes free trade throughout the Asia-Pacific region. It was established in 1989 in response to the growing interdependence of Asia-Pacific economies. An annual APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting is attended by the heads of government of all APEC members. On November 10-12, 2014, the 26th APEC annual gathering was held in Beijing and its the second meeting hosted by China since 2003 in Shanghai. In light of the importance of the APEC meeting, there is a lot of foreign media coverage at home and abroad. China Daily, among many newspapers, is the major English reporting agent in China and has covered the Beijing APEC extensively. At the same time, foreign news papers also focused on the meeting such as CNN and BBC. There might be differences and similarities in the ways China and Western countries report on the same news event. Investigations of the news reports on APEC between Chinese and foreign media can help us figure out the different features of news reports in terms of lexical choices, syntactic structures and so on. In addition, it can offer a better understanding of English speaking countries culturally, ideologically, and politically. The current study attempts to conduct a corpus-based investigation of news reports on 2014 APEC by the Chinese and Western media. Its main task is to find out whether there are any differences in terms of lexical features. 1.2 The basic structure?of the thesis This thesis is divided into five parts: Chapter one is a brief introduction of the?research background and explains the significance of the research. Chapter two is a review of the previous research and the relevant literature on corpus-based lexical research. Chapter three is about the methodology applied in the study. R