| Recently more and more attention has been directed to the study of journalism. At the same time the interest in applying functional grammar to the studies has been on the rise. Scholars both at home and abroad have made quite a few attempts in applying systemic functional linguistics to discourse analysis, since the focus of the study of functional linguistics is communication with language, which is exactly the purpose of news language.This dissertation is an attempt to take the news writing as discourse and functional grammar as the tool of analysis. 300 news texts are picked out from the five famous foreign newspapers and are analyzed in terms of process type, modal elements and thematic elements. I choose two specific types of the news writing: hard news and columns to make a comparative analysis between them. Comparison is made on the similarities and differences between hard news and columns in terms of the metafunctions and register.Functional grammar emphasizes the communicative functions and sociality of language, hence, it is especially suitable in analyzing the news discourses which have fairly intense and clear communicative purposes. A comprehensive and deep analysis with the functional grammar gives the readers a more lucid and more accurate understanding of the news discourses. It provides an efficient guiding method for both reading and writing English news.Moreover, the former linguists concerned only with sentences, while the functional grammar emphasizes discourses, which undoubtedly enlarges the field of the scientific research. Meanwhile, the application of Halliday's theory to the practical study of the special discourses ~ news discourses, proves its reliability and validity. |
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