| News is a significant element in modern society because people are eager to gain information anytime. But it could not reflect the truth completely owing to the existence of the subjectivity. Through the detailed and comprehensive observation of the previous studies, the author finds that many scholars from various fields have made plentiful contributions to the news discourse researches. The prosperity of this field can not cover the limitations of the present studies. For example, though there is enough room for the researches of the news discourse from the perspectives of lexical, rhetorical and other linguistic layers, the application of critical approach is not so comprehensive. Even though it has been used before, the studies on the subjectivity in the field of non-literature is not full, which is worth researching deeper. Moreover, people are always immersed in the studies on subjectivity of political news and economic news because they are easier to unveil the hidden ideology and stand. Compared with them, the relevant study on sports news discourse is a rather fresh field. What's more, the contrastive study between Chinese and English sports news discourse is much more initiative.In view of the limitations of the present studies, the author does her researches from three aspects as follows:first, it is known that political news is much easier to expose the stand and subjectivity of the media. In this paper, the author tries to analyze the sports news discourse with the approach of functional grammar in order to find the existence of subjectivity and its degree; second, the system of transitivity, the thematic structure and the appraisal system are adopted here as researching perspectives to prove that subjectivity exists in the sports news discourse; third, through the contrastive analysis on the sports news reports, which report the same sports events from the two mainstream newspapers—People's Daily and The New York Times, the author finds that the subjectivity exists in the Chinese and English sports news discourse at the same time.In this paper, the author does quantitative and qualitative researches on English and Chinese sports news discourses, and the data comes from People's Daily and The New York Times. The perspectives adopted are transitivity, thematic structure and attitude, engagement and graduation systems in appraisal theory.First of all, the study finds that there are mainly five processes of the transitivity system in two samples—material process, relational process, verbal process, mental process and existential process. The former three processes take up the major proportion in two samples. When it comes to the material process, the author finds that the numbers of Brazil-related actors are much more than those of US-related actors in People's Daily, while the numbers are almost the same in The New York Times. It shows that the Chinese media is more neutral and objective, while the American media tries to distract the public's attention from the failure of the American team by approving of their hard work, so it gives the similar mounts of attention to both sides. With reference to the relational process, it appears more in the Chinese news as it can describe the background situation of the game naturally. However, the American media leaves enough room for verbal process to absolve it from responsibility of failure instead of putting forth effort on describing the situation of the game. So, the verbal process appears more in the English news by a large scale.The next, the subject theme occupies the predominant position in both Chinese and English sports news discourse from the perspective of thematic structure. After analyzing the headline, the author finds that the American news takes the winner for the theme as in the normal situations, while the Chinese news carries Rockets-related subject as theme. Regarding the thematic progression, the constant theme, the derived theme and the crossed type appear most often in two samples.Finally, the perspective of appraisal theory is analyzed and discussed. First, in the system of attitude, the appreciation appraisal words are frequently used in two samples. As to the positive affect appraisal words, the Chinese news uses them more than English one. The latter just expresses the Chinese affection by presenting the grand occasion. In order to be more objective, the English news uses more judgment appraisal words than the Chinese news. The Chinese media would like to adopt more effective methods to catch readers. In this system, the Chinese news uses more positive words, while the English news employs more negative ones. Second, in the system of engagement, the Chinese news uses more monogloss to show its confidence, while the English news uses more heterogloss to shirk responsibility. Third, in the system of graduation, the Chinese news uses more raise words and many sharpen words to stress the topic and extol the spectacular scene of the Olympic Games in Bei Jing, while the English news uses more lower words and considerable soften words to weaken the Chinese morale. In this way, the position of the US as a big power can not be threatened. So, the subjectivity is obviously embodied in both Chinese and English sports news discourses. |
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