Globalised or Glocalized? A comparison of the linguistic features and actor representation of global news headlines in The Sun and Oriental Daily
Abstract
By analyzing a corpus of newspaper headlines collected from the global news in Britain (from The Sun) and Hong Kong (from Oriental Daily) during a two-month period in 2009, this paper aims to identify the relative influence of globalization on the discursive practices of news writing in the two countries/regions. English news headlines, usually configured in short phrases, tend to present events as humorous or dramatic adventures through the deployment of imagined quotations, informal words, and creative sound effects such as rhyme and alliteration, whereas Chinese news headlines make greater use of complete sentences and rarely feature quotations or sound effects. In addition to these different linguistic realizations of headlines, actor representation in British newspapers is also found to be more ‘globalized’ with less focus on ‘others,’ whereas Hong Kong’s Chinese-language newspapers appear to provide greater distance from globalization by positioning international actors as ‘others.’ It is argued here that the use of humorous and adventurous voices in English news and the more frequent representation of global actors as ‘others’ in Chinese news are simply different strategies aimed at achieving the same goal of distancing global actors from the local.
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Copyright (c) 2012 Kenneth C. C. Kong
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