Findings: Scanning the Spectrum of Narratives

Chapter 7 “Findings: Scanning the Spectrum of Narratives” comprises two parts. First, topic salience and actor prominence are detailed per newspaper in a chronological survey of their daily coverage from 28 June to 5 July 1997. This familiarizes the reader with the day-to-day unfolding of events. The second and largest subsection details the general characteristics of the Taiwanese and Chinese English-language corpora, based on patterns found during the qualitative content and discourse analysis. Findings are first listed per newspaper, followed by a schematic comparison of the two Taiwanese papers, which are in the end also compared schematically with the daily on the Chinese mainland. The comparative accounts show the most salient dissonances/consonances in the handover narratives. For each paper, the following two aspects are checked: (1) Focus, balance of voices, tone, and stylistics and (2) thematic hierarchies and discursive practices. The discussion closes with a brief semiotic analysis of intertextual properties, such as interaction between text, image and page layout and draws concluding remarks on the diverging ideological perspectives.