A Contrastive Analysis of Tenor in Vietnamese and English Newspaper Commentary: the Case of Vnexpress and the Washington Post

Abstract

Employing the discourse analysis framework grounded on M.A.K. Halliday’s Register Theory, this article focuses on examining the Tenor component to clarify the interaction between authors and readers in news commentary discourse. The corpus consists of 157 news commentary texts collected in April 2022 from VnExpress and The Washington Post. This corpus was then analyzed based on four linguistic indicators: the address system, modal expressions, sentence types, and politeness strategies. The results reveal a clear contrast: while Vietnamese discourse constructs a sharing, empathetic atmosphere through the frequent use of pronouns such as “tôi” (I) and “bạn” (you), direct evaluative language, and a higher proportion of imperative sentences, English discourse establishes an argumentative, authority-based atmosphere reflected in the high frequency of the pronoun “I”, modal verbs “could/should”, evidence-based argumentation, and the overwhelming dominance of declarative sentences. This difference is explained as a consequence of the influence of two distinct communicative culture models and journalistic institutions.