A Comparative Study Of The Genre Of International Political News Reports In China Daily And The Times-From Systemic-Functional Approaches

As English is a widely-used international language, the English language becomes an important media to spread news and information in order to meet the requirements of rapid economic and social development. Therefore, under this background, more and more English newspapers are published in different countries especially in some non-English-speaking countries, while more and more scholars, especially linguists, are interested in the study of journalistic English. However, in their studies, two aspects are mainly emphasized: writing techniques and the stylistic features. And few of them have contributed to the comparison of the English news reports written by Chinese news writers and those by native speakers, which is the focus of the present study.In the thesis, the two newspapers—China Daily and The Times are selected. The news materials are all collected from the official websites of the two newspapers and two news data are built. The thesis sets out on a comparative study of the generic features of the international political news reports of an English newspaper published in China and an English newspaper published in United Kingdom. From a functional grammar perspective, theories in the interpersonal metafunction, the experiential metafunction and the textual metafunction are adopted. And with the help of the statistical methods, the generic features of the two newspapers' political news are compared on three levels, so that many similarities as well as some differences of the generic features have been perceived.The practical significance of this study is to explore the similarities and differences of the generic features of the international news reports between the English news reports in Chinese newspapers and those in British ones. And it tries to find out the reasons that why they exist with the aid of the cross-cultural communication background. Moreover, the writer hopes the research information in the filed of the functional grammar can contribute to enrich the relevant research topics. At last, it provides a way for news readers to gain an accurate and deep understanding of news English and gives a better appreciation for culture background both at home and abroad.