A COMPARISION OF THE FREQUENCY OF OCCURRENCE OF ‘YESTERDAY,’ ‘TODAY,’ AND ‘TOMORROW’ IN ENGLISH NEWS WRITTEN BY VIETNAMESE AND THOSE BY NATIVE SPEAKERS

Tóm tắt

This paper analyzes the frequency of occurrence of three English time deictic words, namely ‘yesterday,’ ‘today,’ and ‘tomorrow’ and compare their occurrences in business news written by Vietnamese and and those by native speakers in the US and UK. One third of the samples were written by Vietnamese news reporters who currently work as news reporters in Vietnam; the rest of the samples were collected from news written by native speakers in two popular electronic papers New York Times and BBC news in US and UK respectively. Generally, there is a discrepancy in the occurrence of ‘yesterday’, ‘today’, and ‘tomorrow’ in news by Vietnamese writers and native speakers, in which Vietnamese tends to make more use of these words to describe the time of an event. To be more specific, Vietnamese writers tend to employ these words at a much higher frequency in their news than their counterparts in native English speaking countries.