Stylistic Features Of English Sports News In The Framework Of Register Theory

With the popularization of international sports and the convening of Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, sports news attracts more attention. Released in great amount, sports news has formed an independent register. However, compared with other registers, sports news reporting has not enjoyed its due attention. Therefore, the thesis collects data from English sports news during Beijing Olympic 2008 to study the stylistic features of English sports news in the framework of register theory. From the discussion and analysis in this thesis, it is found that, in the field of English sports news, heavy use of sports terms, nicknames and numbers appear; material process is the most frequently used process in sports news; relational process and verbal process also take a relatively important place, while other processes are seldom used. This specifies that the newspaper sports news is a combination of descriptive and narrative text. Concerning the tenor of English sports news, the use of nicknames, short sentences and short paragraphs make the style of sports news informal, which helps to improve the relationship with the reader; the dominant mood type in the sports news is fully indicative, giving information about the sports events and helping the reader understand the events in detail; modal operators, modal adjuncts and appraisable words are sometimes used to show the competitiveness and excitement of sports events. As for the mode, English sports news combines features of speech and writing in one text. On one hand, features of writing style are obvious, including technical terms, dense words, and complex sentences; on the other, colloquialism, slangs, simple conjunctions and common words are frequently used to make the news colloquial. Hence sports news belongs to written language with colloquial features. Besides, in the thesis, sports news' register foregrounding, which refers to register deviation for realizing foregrounding, is also discussed from the aspects of register variables. In the field, coinage, neologism and fuzzy words are adopted; in the tenor, the diversification of address forms is used to make the relationships close among the sportsman, the reporter and the reader; the tendency of colloquialism, and the frontalization of the new information achieve the foregrounding of mode. The functions are attracting and entertaining the reader. As a whole, the thesis hopes to help readers, especially language learners, understand English sports news effectively, and to be beneficial to English sports news reading and writing.