On The News Discourse

News is works which journalists narrate and construct events with a system of language in the context of society, politics, and culture. It is a dynamic representation discourse. Thus, we may consider news as discourse and analyze it. Combined the discourse analysis of British and American school with the discourse analysis of French and Germany school, I have studied news discourse systematically and thoroughly in this dissertation, which consists of five parts.Using stratificational grammar of structuralist linguistics for reference, the first chapter analyses the conventional categories and schema, principle, character of news structure and relations between them and cognition. Based on the analysis of news examples, the chapter draws the conclusions: first, news discourse consists of six basic categories of headline, lead, event, consequence/reaction, background and comment. At the view of linear sequence, these categories are on the same level. In fact, their levels of structure are not the same. The categories of event and consequence/reaction are united firstly as the category of mini-episode. The mini-episode and background are united secondly as the category of episode. Then, the categories of episode and comment are united as the category of news story, and at the same time, the categories of headline and lead are united as the category of summary. At last, the category of summary and the category of news story are integrated the whole news discourse. However, the conventional schema of news gives birth to various variants according to concrete context. The unity of categories of news discourse follows the two principles of relevance and recency. Regardless of conventional schema and its variants, news discourse is characterized discontinuity and assembly. The structural schema, principles and characters of news discourse adapt to the cognitive laws of mankind, the time utility and the function of spreading messages of news discourse.The second chapter aims at the narrative skills which journalists construct events of objectiveness, trueness and tendentiousness in news discourse. The narrative skills consist of three kinds of choices of words and expressions, sentence patterns and narrative perspectives. The choices of words and expressions consist of attendance or absence of various verbal valents, the adoption of nominalization or not. The choices of sentence patterns are composed of the choices of process types, which are action, state, mentality and verbal, and the choices of topic and focus, which stand for old and new information respectively. And the narrative perspectives of news discourse have commonly the seven kinds of editorial omniscience, neutral omniscience, dramatic mode, first person eyewitness, third person witness, indefinite person concerned and multiple person concerned. In fact, all the choices are the selections of 'attendance' or 'absence', 'frontstage 'or 'backstage' for the purpose of expressing a certain subjective tendency and standpoint, so they are not only means but also rusults of manipulation of mainstreaming ideology. From the angles of semeiology and mythology, the third chapter demonstrates firstly why news discourse has the speciality of myth and how news discourse constructs myth, then demonstrates how the speciality of myth makes news discourse not only a objective narration of facts but also a expression of ideology. Myth is a cognition and explanation of nature and social reality, so it is a cultural meaning. In fact, myth was a objective narration of facts when it was created. In this sense, newsdiscourse and myth have the identity; namely, news is a myth-maker, which proves that news discourse has the speciality of myth. Besides this, the other manifestation which news discourse has speciality of myth is that it has the essences of myth, which are twice signifying and naturalized operation. It is the essences that make news discourse has the functions as follows: it makes the special historical signification naturalized and rationalized, and makes...