Substitution in English and Vietnamese Brief News

In the period of globalization nowadays, mass media are quite popular forms in our
everyday life. They have deep influence on every corner of society and man on the earth.
Therefore, it is stated that mass media have played an important role in modern society, in the
struggle for building, development and defense of each nation. They are bridges for exchanging
relations of economy, culture and other fields among countries in the world.
Especially, news is one of the forms which mass media most mainly use to inform us of
what is going on or what has already happened around us such as fires, natural disasters or
other important incidents in the country or in the world. They become so popular that one can
get news at anytime and anyplace in different ways. For example, some read newspapers or
magazines, some listen to radio or watch television; meanwhile, others take a little time to surf
web pages before starting work in the morning.
Obviously, news plays an important role in our modern society. Especially, brief news is
one of the rich sources of information. It lets us know everything taking place in all parts of the
earth in a condense way. Besides, it also saves our time. However, in order to interpret a piece
of brief news quickly and clearly, news readers ought to take substitution into account because,
as we know, when writing brief news items, authors always try to find the way how to make
them as short and intelligible as possible. If news readers do not have some knowledge of
substitution, they will meet a lot of difficulty in understanding brief news, even sometimes they
will misunderstand it. For example
(1.1) Pyongyang warned its neighbors, South Korea and Japan, that they were
courting “disaster” if they continued to support United States policy in the region. With its
warning to Seoul, North Korea seemed to undermine extensive recent talks with South Korea on
resuming economic links between the countries which included a resumption of aid. [53,
p.11]
This piece of brief news contains some pronouns such as ‘they’, ‘its’ and ‘which’; and if
we do not understand anything about substitution, we will not know what they replace.
Therefore, difficulty in grasping the news is inevitable.
Up to now, there have been a lot of English and Vietnamese writers investigating
various cohesive devices assisting to create cohesion and coherence. Halliday and Hassan
(1976) divide cohesion into five types of devices: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunctions
and lexical ties. Whereas, Cook (1989) pays much attention to cohesive devices such as verb
form, parallelism, repetition, lexical chains and formal links. Mccarthy (1991) considers such
grammatical contributions to discourse as reference, substitution and conjunction taking
function as cohesive markers to create links within and between sentences. Everlyn Hatch
(1992) emphasizes that coherence in discourse can be obtained by the general form of the
discourse within which we can use cohesive devices or deictic markers. Yule (1996) presents
lexical substitutions related to the terms “anaphora” and “cataphora”. According to him, these
two terms are used for identifying something mentioned in the discourse. Swan (1986), Quirk
(1976) and Greenbaum (1985) touch substitution upon the structural view. More recently,

Johnstone (2002), studies the relationship between discourse and various aspects of context
such as linguistic structures, participants and prior discourse.
In Vietnamese, Trần Ngọc Thêm (1985) investigates cohesion in detail, especially
substitution in cohesion. He it separates into two types: synonym substitution and pronoun
substitution; whereas, Diệp Quang Ban (1998) regards synonym substitution as a cohesive
device-lexical cohesion. Next, Phan Văn Hoà (1998) shows the pragmatic effects of various
cohesive devices for different semantic relations with specific examples.
The language of newspapers is investigated by many authors. Crystal and Davy (1969)
examine the language of newspapers reporting through chosen extracts of journalistic writing.
Next, Galperin (1971) assesses the newspaper style as a combination style. Sara Thorne (1997)
gives an interest in the key features of newspaper language in a synthetic way offering the
skills and knowledge needed to the study language effectively. Recently, Nguyễn Thị Phước Đa
(2004) has examined English lexical choice and the propaganda effects through brief news.
Trần Nguyễn Hoàng Trang (2007), when studying the discourse of economic brief news,
concentrates on the four aspects namely layout, grammatical, lexical features and cohesive
devices.