A Cognitive-linguistic Analysis Of The Subjectivity In China’s News English

Objectivity is always considered as an important principle in news reporting. Newswriters usually try to avoid subjective attitudes or emotions being revealed in newswriting. But with the development of subjectivity and subjectification theory in cognitivelinguistics, more and more scholars began to notice the subjective elements of language.The English media in China are the main channels of disseminating the informationabout China. The study of news English is of great importance and significance in Chinaboth theoretically and practically.This thesis studies subjectivity as a universal characteristic of language expressed innews English from readers’ perspective. The news data is106front page news articlescollected from the English version of China Daily and Beijing Review. The analysis iscarried out at lexical, syntactic, and textual levels. The study aims at exhibiting a macro picture of the subjectivity representation in news English and discussing how newsreaders may be influenced by these subjective expressions. The study may deepen andexpend the study on the non-propositional function of language and cognitive linguistics-based language studies; and also may help news readers to notice the subjectivity in newslanguage.This study is a descriptive and expository research. Some typical potentialsubjective expressions are chosen and the occurrence of each type of expression isexamined to find out their distributing rules; and then the author analyzes some typicalexpressions in news language as examples; and finally the thesis tries to explain andconclude the characteristics and reasons for news writers’ expressing of stances, attitudesand emotions in a news text.The study finds that at every linguistic level, there are some typical subjectiveexpressions from which we can learn news writers’ stands, opinions, or emotions towardsnews events. News writers tend to let readers unconsciously get involved in his/herjudgments about the news events. With the guidance of some cognitive linguisticprinciples, scholars and readers can analyze those underlying subjectivity of newslanguage. The innovations of the study are that it takes the latest English news as studyobject and it discusses their subjectivity representations under the framework of cognitivelinguistics. This may provide some references for further subjectivity related studies.