THESIS SUMMARY TV news in english and vietnamese

However, for Vietnamese learners of English, the use of news broadcasts in learning seems spontaneous.The news language itself as well as differences in news broadcastsbetween British cu

University of languages and international studies

-o0o -HOANG THI NGOC DIEM

THESIS SUMMARY

TV news in English and Vietnamese

(Phân tích bản tin truyền hình tiếng Anh và tiếng Việt)

Major: English Linguistics Code: 62 22 15 01

A Thesis Submitted in Total Fulfillment of the Requirements for the

Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Supervisors: Ha Cam Tam, PhD

Assoc Prof Tran Xuan Diep (PhD)

Ha Noi - 2014

PART I - Introduction

1 Rationale

The media has now become one of the principal means of gettinginformation about the world Not only for information, are the mediaalso used for various purposes including entertainment, education,national identity enhancement or even political ones Among mediachannels, television seems to be increasingly popular and favoured asaccess to television is widening to everyone and every corner of theworld It is largely believed that the media are always there, and havecome to be taken for granted as an integral part of most people’s lives.With its crucial role, the power of the media cannot be denied They are

a “site for the production and circulation of social meanings, i.e to agreat extent the media decide the significance of things that happen inthe world for any given culture” (Thornborrow, 2004:56)

Within the research circle, the media has been explored a great deal sofar With regards to TV news alone, much interest has been shown in thefield of linguistics Hohn (1995) investigated linguistic features of BBCRadio 1 and Radio 4 to find out the similarities and differences betweenthem In 2006, Luginbuehl presented the result of comparing newsstories in American and Swiss TV news since the 60s in view of

“culturality” His conclusion stated that Swiss TV news showed adetached way of reporting while CBS news displayed close andimmediate reports; cultural differences were also found in differentjournalistic roles At the same time, Senokozlieva and her co-researchers(2006) also examined the relationship between culture and selectedformal characteristics of newscasts from three regions: The UnitedStates of America, Germany and the Arab world Their findings showedthat in collectivist societies like the Arab world, there were moredisplays of groups or individuals who are contextualized by others than

in the individualistic US Most recently, Shi Hong-mei (2008)conducted a critical analysis on turn-taking organization in English newsinterviews in China and her results showed the influence of the powerand ideology on turn-taking; the interviewer with the institutional role,could interrupt or insert their turn-taking to control, direct the talk asintended plan

Apart from the findings that those authors have made about news above,news and television news are also of great importance in reasoning theway human mind sees events and representing them via language Thiscan be a great opportunity to theoretically and practically contribute tothe field of cognitive linguistics However, to the best of my

knowledge, comprehensive investigations into news features ofVietnamese and British broadcasting from cognitive linguistics andseem to be rare

From pedagogical approach, newscasts in general are a rich source ofauthentic materials for foreign language learning and teaching News ispractically integrated into textbooks, English software, interactivewebsites for e-learning, and are used to develop all skills as well asparticular subjects like translation and interpretation BBC itself also

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/index.shtml) withvarious activities Besides, access to visual original news is undoubtedlybecoming common for self-learning However, for Vietnamese learners

of English, the use of news broadcasts in learning seems spontaneous.The news language itself as well as differences in news broadcastsbetween British culture and Vietnamese culture has not yet beenintroduced systematically to learners and teachers Newscasts are merelyseen by many as an authentic source for practice or one of the accesses

to native speakers or real-life English

Despite the increasing popularity of television news broadcast and itsimportant functions in shaping human perception as well as reasoningthe relationship between human mind, meaning construction andlanguage presentation, from a look into previous studies on newsbroadcasts and an investigation in practical applications of news inteaching, to the best of my knowledge, investigations into comparingnews of Vietnamese and British broadcasting from cognitive approachseem few and far between Basing on that account, the author would like

to conduct an investigation of VTV1 news and BBC World Newsproducts to make a contribution to the large gap of news languageanalysis, hence give suggestions for English language learning andteaching The author does hope the results of the study will be ofpotential concern to those who have interest in linguistics, corpuslinguistics, cognitive linguistics, mass communication and inter-culturalstudy

2 Objectives of the study

The objectives of this study are:

- To investigate the ways by which mental spaces and conceptualblending are realized in English and Vietnamese televisionnews broadcasts,

- To find out the similarities and differences between English andVietnamese television news broadcasts with regards to mentalspaces and conceptual blending,

- To explore Figure-Ground presentation in English andVietnamese news broadcasts, and finally

- To make further contribution to support linguistic circle ingeneral and cognitive linguistics in particular, English languagelearning and teaching, and those who have interest in this area

3 Scope of the study

Television news broadcasts as a part of the media are an endless source

of data for various study approaches The thesis focuses on televisionnews in English and Vietnamese covering the topic of natural disasters.The reasons for the choice of news topic are discussed in chapter 2, part

II of this dissertation The main source of data is daily news from BBCWorld News channel and VTV1 newscasts News broadcasts are studiedfrom cognitive linguistics perspective with the assistance of corpus-based analysis techniques The analytical framework is centered onmental spaces, conceptual blending and Figure-Ground theories Othernews topics, other sources of news as well as other linguistic approaches

to news language fall beyond the scope of this study

PART II - DEVELOPMENT Chapter 1: literature review

1.1 Background of news language

1.2 Cognitive linguistics

1.2.1 Overview

It has long been clear that cognitive development proceeds with theacquisition of language and that the two developmental processes arenot only temporally but also causally connected According to atraditional view of what causes what, “it is the structure and operation ofthe mind that determines the grammatical and semantic structure oflanguages” (Lyons, 1995) Any linguistic theory that is based on thetraditional view of the direction of causation between the mind andlanguage is referred to as cognitivism

1.2.2 The nature of cognitive linguistics

According to Lakoff (1992) and other cognitive linguists such as Evansand Green (2006), there are two key commitments that make cognitivelinguistics a distinctive enterprise They are Generalisation commitmentand Cognitive commitment Especially, together with these twocommitments, the nature of cognitive linguistics is basically focused onaddressing the relationship between language, the mind and experiencewhich is thoroughly discussed in the embodied cognition thesis

1.3 Mental spaces

1.3.1 Definition and categorization

In the very broad area of cognitive semantics, mental space theories are

a potential land for researches Mental spaces, theories developed byFauconnier (1997), “are very partial assemblies constructed as we thinkand talk, for purposes of local understanding and action They containelements and are structured by frames and cognitive models” In otherwords, mental spaces are constructed and modified as thought anddiscourse unfolds and are connected to each other by various kinds ofmappings, in particular identity and analogy mappings It has beenhypothesized that at the neural level, mental spaces are sets of activatedneuronal assemblies and that the connections between elementscorrespond to coactivation-bindings In this view, mental spaces operate

in working memory but are built up partly by activating structuresavailable from long-term memory

Interestingly, because mental space theory offers a unified andconsistent means of understanding reference, co-reference, and thecomprehension of stories and descriptions whether they are currentlyreal, historical, imagined, hypothesised or happening remotely,Stockkwell (2002:96) classified mental space into four main types:

- Time spaces – current space or displacement into past or

future, typically indicated by temporal adverbials, tense andaspect

- Space spaces – geographical spaces, typically indicated by

locative adverbials, and verbs of movement

- Domain spaces – an area of activity, such as work, games,

scientific experiment, and so on

- Hypothetical spaces – conditional situations, hypothetical and

unrealized possibilities, suggestions for plans and speculation

1.3.2 Speech space

Related to time spaces, apart from temporal adverbials, tense, aspect,Fauconnier (1997) particularly emphasizes on Time which is created byspeech verbs They no longer work on present or past meaning but set

up spaces portioning out the content of what is said, and these speechspaces have the following important special properties, according toFauconnier (1997:89):

- They have an inherent strong Viewpoint Role filled by thespeaker or experiencer of the reported speech event

- The Speech Space represents a time period that minimallyincludes the time of the reported speech event (but may belarger) The Speech Space and all spaces subordinate to itconstitute a Speech Domain A configuration containing a

Speech Domain has two inherent Viewpoints, the one from theBase, and one from the Speech Space

- Spaces in the Speech Domain are assigned a FACT orPREDICTION status with respect to the Speech Space

- Spaces in the Speech Domain may be accessed via thefollowing access paths:

+ directly from the Speech Space;

+ directly from the Base;

+ from the Base via the Speech Space

1.3.3 Space builders

A mental space is constructed with space builders Language has manydevices to guide the construction and connection of mental spaces.Fauconnier (2006) divides spaces building elements into two types –discourse configurations and grammatical devices for cognitiveconstruction

Firstly, with regards to discourse configuration, the builders include anylanguage expression that has a meaning potential in a completediscourse and in a context When approached in this way, grammaticalclues, also crucial to the building process, are themselves insufficient toset up internationally structured domains and situational clues Suchdiscourse elements may include, according to Fauconnier (1997:39, 40):

- Information regarding what new spaces are being set up,typically expressed by means of space builders (For example:Susan wishes, Susan hopes, in 1998, etc);

- clues as to what space is currently in focus, what itsconnection to the base is, and how accessible it is; thisinformation is typically expressed by means of grammaticaltenses and moods (for example: In reality, If it rains, in thatstory, etc);

- descriptions that introduce new elements (and possibly theircounterparts) into spaces (Max, Napoleon, having the nameNapoleon, etc);

- descriptions or anaphors or names that identify existingelements (and possibly their counterparts);

- lexical information that connects the mental-space elements toframes and cognitive models from background knowledge; thisinformation structures the spaces internally by takingadvantage of available pre-structured background schemas;such pre-structured schemas can, however, be altered orelaborated within the constructions under way;

- presuppositional markings that allow some of the structure to

be instantly propagated through the space configuration;

- pragmatic and rhetoric information, conveyed by words like

“even”, “but”, “already”, which typically signal implicit scalesfor reasoning and argumentation (for example: a vicioussnake)

The second type, grammatical devices, is composed of a variety ofgrammatical forms to open a new space or shift focus to a new part of anexisting space They can be locatives (‘in’, ‘at’), adverbials (‘actually’,

‘really’), prepositional phrases, subject-verb complexes or conditionals(‘if’, ‘when’ Additionally, Spaces are structured by names anddescriptions, tense, mood and other aspectuals, by presuppositions, and

by trans-spatial operators These are the copulative verbs in Englishsuch as ‘be’, ‘become’ and ‘remain’ They link elements in differentspaces

1.4 Conceptual blending

1.4.1 Basic concepts

Extended narratives have also been discussed in mental space theory,through the useful notion of conceptual blending Fauconnier & Turner(2003) started to study conceptual blending systematically in 1993,when they discovered the structural uniformity and wide application ofthe notion Since then, important work has been done on the theory ofconceptual blending, and its empirical manifestations inmathematics, social science, literature, linguistics, and music Therehave been proposals for the mathematical and computationalmodeling of the operation, and experimental research withinneuroscience on the corresponding neural and cognitive processes

In the two authors’ view, (Fauconnier & Turner, 2003), conceptualblending is a basic mental operation that leads to new meaning, globalinsight, and conceptual compressions useful for memory andmanipulation of otherwise diffuse ranges of meaning It plays afundamental role in the construction of meaning in everyday life, inthe arts and sciences, and especially in the social and behavioralsciences The essence of the operation is to construct a partialmatch between two input mental spaces, to project selectively fromthose inputs into a novel 'blended' mental space, which thendynamically develops emergent structure Mental spaces are smallconceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes oflocal understanding and action –they are very partial assembliescontaining elements, structured by frames and cognitive models Ithas been suggested that the capacity for complex conceptual blending("double-scope" integration) is the crucial capacity needed for thoughtand language

1.5 Figure and Ground

1.5.1 Background concepts

In cognitive linguistics, the notion of Figure and Ground is a basic andpowerful idea which has been explored to develop a detailedgrammatical semantic framework as well as very general and abstractideas across discourses Peter Stockwell (2002) has successfullyemployed Figure and Ground notion to understand general literaturarycritical concepts

Talmy (2000) calls Figure the concept that needs anchoring and Groundthe concept that does the anchoring In the example “The bike is near thehouse”, the “bike” as the Figure and the “house” as the Ground cansatisfy most of the characteristics in the list above

The next property of Figure and Ground that is of concern in this study

is the semantic factors in relation with their grammatical relations Inother examples discussed above, the Figure and Ground functions of thetwo nominals or two events vary in correlation with their grammaticalrelation: subject as Figure and oblique object as Ground, event in themain clause as Figure and that in subordinate clause as Ground But insome cases, the nominals keep the same semantic function, even withdifferent grammatical relation The sentences below can best exemplifythis:

a Smoke (F) slowly filled the room (G)

b The room (G) slowly filled with smoke (F)

(Talmy, 2000:333)

In both these sentences, whether as subject or object, the room remainsits Ground function as reference entity that serves to characterize thepath of the smoke, with its Figure function as variably located entity.There is clearly a semantic difference between such inverse forms, but itseems to involve other factors than variable-point versus reference-pointfunctions

Chapter 2: Research methodology

(3) What are the features of conceptual blending in English andVietnamese news broadcasts?

(4) What are the similarities and differences between Englishand Vietnamese television news broadcasts regarding conceptualblending?

(5) How are Figure-Ground principles presented in English andVietnamese television news broadcasts?

(6) What are the similarities and differences in Figure-Groundrelationships between English and Vietnamese television newsbroadcasts?

2.2 Analytical framework – corpus-assisted cognitive semantics 2.5.1 Cognitive framework

As discussed in the previous chapter, the data of the study wereanalyzed from cognitive view, particularly, under the light of mentalspaces, conceptual blending and Figure and Ground The theoreticalbackground of mental spaces and conceptual blending was based onFauconnier’s viewpoint (Fauconnier, 1997, 2003) and the classification

of mental spaces proposed by Stockwell (2002) News reports werestudy to explore features in speech spaces, hypothetical spaces andblended spaces To conduct the analysis, space builders, which weresynthesized by Fauconnier (1997), were used Hence, the analyticalangle for issues related to mental spaces was designed as follows:

- To examine speech space, verbs of speech were put much

considerations Speech verbs (like “say”, ‘announce” or “tell”) set upspaces partitioning out the content of what is said Reported speech wasalso used to make comparison and contrast Additionally, status ofsenders (those who were involved in reporting the events) was alsotraced out to find out the sources of information

- In terms of hypothetical space, expressions for advice, order,

prediction, estimation and evaluation were put attention to Relatedmodal verbs (e.g must, should, may, might), lexical verbs (e.g.: advise),adverbs (e.g.: possibly, certainly, extremely, etc), adjectives (possible,certain, huge, likely, etc) were studied and put into statistic

- The framework for conceptual blending was focused on condition

sentences, comparative sentences, metaphors and metonymy The use ofmetaphors was most commonly found in describing the occurring action

of the disasters and in emphasizing their consequences or humansuffering To identify the salient use of metaphors, collocations fordisasters were first sorted out and synthesized

The second matter that was explored in news language was Figure and Ground The theoretical background was based on Talmy’s viewpoint

(Talmy, 2000) as discussed in the previous chapter The analysis was

emphasized on roles of entities and precedence principles That is,entities appearing in the news stories were investigated to see their roles

as Figure and Ground Particularly, there were two entities that werestudied in depth, compared and contrasted to see their roles and change

of roles They are the disaster itself and the affected area Then,precedence principles were applied to study the basic and reverse form

of Figure and Ground

All the builders and research elements mentioned above weresynthesized and presented in the table below:

(a) Space builders of mental spaces developed from Fauconnier’s theory (1997)

Prediction Estimation Evaluation

2.5.2 Corpus assisted analysis

To examine all studied phenomena, the authentic texts were compiled tomake two parallel corpora Technically, a concordance tool – textSTAT– was exploited to process the corpora It helped to trace out spacebuilders, expressions as well as their frequency It was also useful infinding out the words in context and provides citations for illustration Furthermore, this concordance tool also helped the author to set up acollection of collocations for natural disasters which was very helpful in

determining areas of analysis With respect to the benefits of exploringcollocations, Baker (2006:114) asserts that a collocational analysis isuseful for two reasons First, it supports a focus for our initial analysiswhich is particularly helpful when a large number of concordance linesneed to be sorted multiple times in order to reveal lexical patterns.Secondly, it provides the most salient and obvious lexical patternssurrounding a subject, from which a number of discourses can beobtained Additionally, when two words frequently collocate, there isevidence that the discourses surrounding them are particularly powerful– the strength of collocation implies that these are two concepts whichhave been linked in the minds of people and have been used again andagain Corpus data therefore brings one way of understanding language,based on what is typical.

In analyzing corpora, frequencies can be used in order to uncover theexistence of discourses in text This means also show its strength inexamine the spread and position of particular terms in a text via wordcounts and dispersion data The notion of simple lexical frequencies hasalso been expanded to explore multi-word units or clusters which issignificant in taking into account the context that a single word appears

in With different benefits, concordances can help trace words in theircontexts as well as the co-occurrence of others words related to them.Collocation, on the other hand, assists researchers in in-depthexploration of words, phrases and expressions In sum, corpus analysiscan enable researchers to deal with various lexical and grammaticalproblems such as word forms, phrases, use of language, meanings,structures, grammar and so on

2.3 Data collection

2.3.1 Criteria for collecting data

In this study, two corpora of television news are used for analysis Oneconsists of news report recordings from Vietnam Television (newsprogramme on VTV1 channel) and the other of British BroadcastingCorporation (BBC World News channel) The reasons for the choice ofthe two channels are outlined below

Firstly is the authenticity of the data The data are composed of dailynews reports recorded on daily basis from 2009 to 2012 They can beseen as samples of real-life use of the language aiming at a very largeand popular target audience They not only exemplify the typicallanguage use in news stories but also help to reveal the new and non-dictionary use of the language which illustrates the changing nature oflanguage through human experience and time

The second criterion for selecting the data is the reputation andpopularity of the data source On its official website (www.bbc.co.uk),

BBC claims itself as the largest government-independent broadcastingcorporation in the world The BBC was founded according to threepublic principles: universality, fairness and equity, and – accountability.BBC World News channel is at the heart of the BBC's commitment toglobal broadcasting As an integral member of BBC Global News, BBCWorld News delivers impartial, in-depth analysis of breaking news, aswell as looking at the stories behind the news - not just what ishappening, but why Most importantly, it is a public service broadcaster,established by a Royal Charter and funded by the license fee that is paid

by UK households Therefore, the BBC is “independent from politicaland commercial influences” (Review of the BBC’s Royal Charter,2005:38) The other source of sample, Vietnam Television, is also theofficial national voice of Vietnam Its channel, VTV1, is specialized ingeneral information of all aspects of life It is also the newest channel ofthe nation with high prestige Both selected broadcasts present thenational standard language of their nations, that is, standard Vietnameseand standard English Give those reasons, VTV1 news programme andBBC World News are selected for the purpose of the study

The target audience of VTV1 news broadcast and BBC World News areeveryone nation-wide and world-wide regardless of age, gender,profession or social status News items under study are those centeredround the topics of natural disasters Disasters originated from politicalconflicts, religious causes or terrorism are excluded To ensure thereliability of the purely linguistic results, these topics were selected in away to minimize factors such as power, political purposes of the use oflanguage

2.3.2 Corpus design

After the source of data was determined, news reports were recordedand refined The BBC news corpus was composed of 56.478 words Themain topic was natural disasters including sub-domains: floods,mudslides, drought, tsunami, earthquake, volcanoes, tornado, snowstorms and freezing The VTV1 news corpus consisted of 54.298 words.The subtypes of natural disasters include sub-domains: floods,mudslides, drought, earthquake, volcanoes, freezing, tornado, hail Intotal, there were more than 100.000 words in the two built corpora Theoriginal collection of the two corpora was compiled in Appendix 5

2.3.3 Representativity of the data

The two corpora were built with the similar size to ensure the statisticvalues of the comparison With such constraints on the corpus, it wasbelieved that the analysis would yield stable and reliable data It can besaid that the size of the corpora is big enough, manageable manually andsufficient for a qualitative study on transcribed spoken data

Furthermore, up till now there is no agreement on the size of a corpus towarrantee valid results While there are corpora composed of millions ofwords like the BNC (British National Corpus) with 100 million wordsand COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American) with 425 millionwords, there are also much smaller corpora in size such as SEC (SpokenEnglish Corpus of radio broadcasts) with 53.000 words or the PWC(Polytechnic of Wales Corpus of children speech) with 65.000 words.Therefore, it can be argued that, with the feature of the data collectedfrom transcribed spoken language and restricted to the channel oftelevision news focusing on the domain of natural disasters, togetherwith the purpose of the study as to look deeply into the cognitive side ofthe language use, the corpora used in this study is representative enough

to produce reliable and valid conclusions

2.4 Data collection instruments

Video recording is the main method of collecting data of this research.

The software Snagit – The Windows Screen Capture Utility version9.1.2 retrieved from www.techsmith.com was exploited as the mainrecording tool For news clips which were already available online, theywere downloaded with a software and refined to make sure they met therequirements of the study

Once the newscasts were captured, they were all manually transcribedinto texts The transcription work was complied with the typical rule oftranscribing data which is “Transcripts do not predetermine whatphenomenon is going to study Transcripts routinely provide extremelydetailed information about what people say and how people say it”(Markee, 2000:55) However, the focus of this study is the news textsonly Therefore, factors such as intonation, pauses were not taken intoaccounts and noted in the transcripts For those newscasts the transcripts

of which were already done or available, the texts were examined toeliminate unrelated elements such as figures, figures or advertisements

Last but not least, a concordance tool is essential in sorting out most of the search indicators The software TextSTAT is chosen as the main

concordance tool of this corpus-based study because it is easy to use,free of charge, and most importantly, it can work with Vietnamese texts,which not all concordance tools can do

For better reliability and validity of my research results, I know greatcaution and care should be put into the work of collection News wasrecorded at prime time of the day from both channels Then, news itemswere refined with the restriction to studied topics The recording wasdone continuously in 4 years (from 2009 to 2012) to yield representativecorpora

Chapter 3: mental spaces in English and

Vietnamese news 3.1 Speech space

Speech spaces were various in both corpora More than one senderappeared in almost all newscasts Besides, speech spaces embedded inanother speech act space were also available in both sources.Particularly, in both corpora, speech verbs were quite various Neutralverbs like “say” in English news or “cho biết” in Vietnamese news wereused more frequently, with more than 60% and nearly 20% respectively,much higher than the percentage of corresponding verbs Apart fromthose verbs, the information appeared to be reported from differentangles English news used more speech verbs with functions like

“warning”, “blaming”, “complaining” while Vietnamese news had verbslike “khẳng định”, “nhấn mạnh”, “ước tính”, which brought morecolours and senses to the news In short, the information in both corpora

of news seemed to come from more various sources with more directinterview and direct details from different personal spaces

However, the differences seem to be outdone by the similarities Thefirst difference lies in the frequency of speech verbs and quotation

Indirect quotes

Vietnamese news Direct quotes 125 1.4 4

Indirect quotes

Table 1: Comparison of quotations in English and Vietnamese news

As can be seen from the table above, the total number of both direct andindirect quotes of English news was much higher than that ofVietnamese news Specifically, the quantity of direct quotes in Englishnews nearly doubled that of direct quotes in Vietnamese news, andsimilarly the figure of indirect quotes in English news was four times ashigh as that in Vietnamese news This evidence can be supported withthe proof of the use of the indirect quotation expression “theo”, with49.4%, which was the dominant figure

With regards to senders, some interesting findings in comparison andcontrast were noted out Senders of all statuses, social ranks wereinvolved, from Prime Minister to farmers, from government institutions

to international organizations Interestingly, ordinary people were mostmentioned in both two corpora, as seen in Table 2