以語料庫之觀念來比較美式及英式訃聞架構之異同

A Corpus-Based Comparison of American and British Newspaper Obituaries

本研究主要在探討訃聞之撰寫是否有固定的規格。研究資料來源為三十篇刊載於美國紐約時報以及英國每日電訊報的訃聞報導。研究者透過語料庫之概念及相關電腦軟體(WordSmith 4.0)之運用，來比較分析所蒐集之語料。研究結果顯示訃聞報導有其獨特的體裁。除了新聞出處、摘要報導這些一般的新聞特徵外，還記錄了死者生平事蹟及故事結尾。不過，不同的新聞機構對訃聞的撰寫也會有不同的風格變化。若以此研究中之兩家報紙為例，這些差異主要在於其如何稱呼死者、有無標明新聞出處、對死亡原因及其家屬細節之著墨，以及如何引述消息來源之上。

The primary aim of the present study was to investigate how contemporary newspaper obituaries function as a genre and how they are composed and organized in systematic ways. Thirty obits from two prototypical quality papers, the New York Times (USA) and the Daily Telegraph (United Kingdom), were examined via a program called WordSmith 4.0. The comparisons and analyses performed on the collected samples revealed that the two varieties of newspaper obits shared the major elements of attribution, abstract, biography, and coda, but they differed from each other in several aspects of formulation. For instance, the New York Times obits were news-oriented while the Daily Telegraph obituaries were more personality-oriented. Moreover, each of the dailies had its own way of crediting the source of supply, listing the circumstances of death and surviving family members, referring to the subject, etc.