1 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY - HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES VŨ THỊ THANH THÚY A STUDY ON INFORMATION FOCUS AT SENTENCE LEVEL IN ENGLISH ECONOMICS NEWS (Nghiên cứu về tiêu điểm thông tin ở cấp độ câu trong các tin kinh tế tiếng Anh) M. MINOR THESIS FIELD: ENGLISH LINGUISTICS CODE: 60.15 HA NOI – 2011 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 2 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY - HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES VŨ THỊ THANH THÚY A STUDY ON INFORMATION FOCUS AT SENTENCE LEVEL IN ENGLISH ECONOMICS NEWS (Nghiên cứu về tiêu điểm thông tin ở cấp độ câu trong các tin kinh tế tiếng Anh) M. MINOR THESIS FIELD: ENGLISH LINGUISTICS CODE: 60. VÕ ĐẠI QUANG (PhD) HA NOI - 2011 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 5 LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Table 1: Marked and Unmarked Theme Table 2: Syntactic Strategies in Assigning Information Focus Table 3: Frequency of Occurrence and Percentage of Contribution of Some Grammatical Devices of End-Focus Strategy in English Economic News Table 4: Frequency of Occurrence and Percentage of Contribution of the Active and Passive in English Economic News Table 5: Frequency of Occurrence and Percentage of Contribution of Sub-categories of Passivization in English Economic News Figure 1: Construction of the Existential strategy Figure 2: Construction of Extrapotition of Finite Subject Clause Figure 3: Construction of Thematic Fronting TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 6 ABBREVIATIONS A: Adverbial C: Complement Cl: Clause ESP: English for special purpose NG: Nominal group O: Object S: Subject V: Verb TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 7 TABLE OF CONTENT Acknowledgements.
ii List of tables and figures. iv Table of content. v CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale of the Study.
Scope of the Study. Objectives of the Study. Method of the Study. Design of the Study.
3 CHAPTER TWO: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 2. The Concept of Discourse. Discourse and Text. Spoken and Written Discourse.
The Notion of Information Structure. Principle of End-Focus. Principle of End-Weight. Economic News Discourse.
16 CHAPTER THREE: INFORMATION FOCUS IN ENGLISH ECONOMICS NEWS 3. Marked and Unmarked Theme. Syntactic Strategies in Assigning Information Focus. End-Focus Strategy.
20 TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail. The Active- Passive Alternative. 30 CHAPTER FOUR: PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS 4. Findings from the Interviews.
Suggested Types of Exercises. 34 CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSIONS 5. Conclusion on Objective One. Conclusion on Objective Two.
Recommendations for Further Studies. 39 Appendices TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 9 CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale of the Study It is common knowledge that language is a means of communication and has always mirrored society. It is English that is one of the most common languages and is being used all over the world in education, business, science, technology.
The economic development of our world recently has given rise to the development of economics literature, including books, magazines, newspapers and journals. Therefore, it is clear that English is needed for economic communication not only in spoken but also in written form. There are messages exchanging in each communication. Any message is the result of number choices made by sender, though it has to be said that these choices are to some extent determined by the context of the message- who the receivers are, what the purpose of the message is.
According to Leech (1975), there are three conditions that make a message to be understood, such as the message has to be cut up into individual pieces of information, the ideas have to be given the right emphasis, and the ideas have to be put in the right order. Accordingly, it is the speaker and the writer who decide how to understand the messages. While speakers can directly convey their information focus through stress and pitch, the writer must construct a clause, indeed the whole sentence (and text), carefully — with judicious word order, punctuation, and discourse implication (about what the writer considers given or new information for the audience) — to recapture the loss of such explicit markers of emphasis in speech. In written English, therefore, the reader has to rely on the structure and ordering of the syntax.
It can be seen that each derivation of the basic English sentence pattern SVO has its own emphasis on different sentence elements. Studying the derivation patterns makes clear contribution to the understanding of how the message is organized and the proper understanding of the message. From the author‘s teaching experience and the common problems faced by students of economics, Vietnamese learners have some difficulties in realizing the information focus of individual clause or sentence. This happens as they do not obtain how the TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 10 focus of information assigned in different sentence patterns.
As a result, they meet certain obstacles in understanding the controlling idea of the whole passage or in writing interesting passages. All the reasons mentioned above have inspired the author to conduct this study. Studying and analyzing economic news discourse attracts the author‘s attention because economics news is one of the highest interests of readers all over the world in general and Vietnamese ones in particulars. Hopefully, the study will make some useful contribution to the way the readers analyze and understand properly how the message is organized and the information focus of each message.
Scope of the Study There are various types of economics discourse which may come from textbooks, newspapers, magazine, reports or journals. However, this study does not explore all the mentioned economics discourse. The writer will only focus on written English economic news discourse taken from some mainstream newspapers. Within the framework of a minor M.A thesis, the present study will just take up syntactic devices employed in assigning information focus at sentence level in the light of discourse.
Furthermore, the investigation is carried out in the English language only. It is hoped that this study will help the readers in general and teachers and students in particular to gain an insight into the information focus of English economic news. Objectives of the Study The inter-related objectives of this thesis are: (i) To give a systematic and comprehensive description of syntactic devices employed for assigning information focus in English economics news. (ii) To propose possible implications for teaching students how to assign information focus.
Method of the Study The study is confined to the syntactic strategies in assigning information focus in English economics news. The result should be useful for language teaching and TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail. In order to achieve the objectives as stated above, research methods of description, analysis, statistics in linguistics and survey have been used. Firstly, ten pieces of English economic news written by different journalists will be carefully selected from mainstream newspapers written in English including Economics, The Times, Times online, The Sunday Times, Global Finance, CNN, etc.
Secondly, all syntactic features in assigning information focus in these news discourses are picked up. The percentages and frequencies of various types of syntactic strategies are calculated. However, only outstanding examples are used to illustrate. Finally, after analyzing and systematizing syntactic strategies employed in the English economics news, the author will carry out interviewing the third-year students of economics major.
Based on the interviews, some implications in teaching English will be figured out. Design of the Study The thesis consists of five chapters: Chapter one of this study is an introduction presenting some background information and the rationale of the study. The objectives, the scope and method of the study are also dealt with in this chapter. Chapter two is aimed to present the theoretical background of the work.
Some essential concepts closely related to the study are carefully discussed one by one. Firstly, some theories of discourse including the concept of discourse, discourse and text, spoken and written discourse. Next, thematic structure and information structure are taken into consideration. In term of information structure, the notion of information structure, information focus, principle of end-focus and principle of end-weight are presented.
Finally, some features of economic news discourse are also discussed in the chapter. Chapter three attempts to analyze English economics news in the light of Discourse Analysis. In this chapter, the marked and unmarked themes, and syntactic strategies in assigning information focus are investigated. The frequency of occurrence and the percentage of contribution of each strategy are clarified.
TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 12 Chapter four is concerned with findings from the interviews of third year students of Economics major at Thai Nguyen University. Based on these findings, some useful pedagogical implications and some suggested types of exercises are delivered. The last chapter is set up to give concluding remarks on the two objectives of the thesis and gives suggestions for further research. TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 13 CHAPTER TWO: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND In this chapter, the author is going to talk about preliminaries that are employed to conduct the investigation into information focus at sentence level in English economics news.
The Concept of Discourse Traditionally, language was viewed as a biologically determined phenomenon and its social aspect was neglected. Language study, therefore, has based on isolated sentences. However, it is more important to produce and understand meaningful language than to produce and recognize grammatically correct sentences. According to Cook (1989), not all sentences are interesting, relevant or suitable; one cannot just put any sentence one after another and hope that it will mean something.
It is not always true that grammatically correct sentences are meaningful. While, although people communicate with correctly complete sentences, they are still make their communication understandable and successful. It cannot be denied that language must be learnt and comprehended in its social context. Consequently, the concept of discourse came into being and has been a rapidly expanding field of linguistic study.
There have been lots of observations on discourse by many linguists and each of them has their own ways to define discourse. Richards (1985) uses the term discourse to refer to language use or language in use. Brown and Yule (1983:18) pointed out that ―discourse is language material, either spoken or written, in actual uses by speakers (and writers) of the language.‖ Cook and Crystal share the similar perspective of discourse. Cook (1989) considered discourse as ―stretches of language perceived to be meaningful, unified, and purposive‖.
Crystal (1992) defined discourse as "a continuous stretch of (especially spoken) language larger than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit such as a sermon, argument, joke, or narrative.‖ However, Widdowson (1997) defines discourse as a use of sentences to perform acts of communication which cohere into larger units. Obviously, a discourse is a unit of meaning and it is the language that is functional. TIEU LUAN MOI download : skknchat@gmail.com 14 As Cook (1989) stated, ―discourse is the language in use for communicating, even though it is an interpersonal or non-personal communicative‖. Within the limit of this paper, we would like to take an idea from Nunan (1993) that discourse is communicative events involving language in context.
Language used in economic news is discourse because it is the language in use for the purpose of communication. Discourse and Text There has been a lot of confusion between the two terms discourse and text, which has been causing a pitfall for discourse analysis. There are some linguists who share the same idea that these two terms can be used interchangeably. According to Halliday & Hasan (1989:10) ―text (discourse) can be defined in the simplest way perhaps by saying that it is language that is functional.
By functional we simply mean language that is doing some job in some context as apposed in isolated words or sentences that I might put on the blackboard. So any living language that is playing some part in a context of situation, we shall call a text.