| Sport is a necessary and inseparable aspect in people’s daily life and sports news is akind of news report that relates to sports events, the establishment and revision of sports lawsand regulations, sports training and living conditions of athletes and so on and so forth.People have access to a large number of sports news reports through many channels ofinformation such as TV, newspaper, magazine, and Internet.Sports news report is a kind of discourse which has been researched and analyzed fromthe perspectives of pragmatics (code-switching), interactional sociolinguistics andethnography of communication by many linguists and scholars such as Chun-xuan SHEN(2011), DanaE. M., Erin B.&Anita A.S.(2011) and Yoshiaki S.&Yasuo A.(2000) and so on.This present research aims to find out the linguistic features of sports news discourses withinthe theoretical framework of M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar (1985) interms of ideational function and interpersonal function. The research corpus is ten pieces ofonline English sports news concerning the2012London Olympic Games randomly collectedfrom some world famous English websites such as BBC, Washington post and ChicagoTribune and so on.Systemic-Functional Grammar is the main concept of London School, according towhich there are three metafunctions-ideational function, interpersonal function and textualfunction of language. The ideational function refers to the language function that expressespeople’s material, mental and some other experiences of the world (Halliday,1985). Itincludes experiential function and logical function, experiential function further includesvoice system and transitivity system, which is linguistically realized by six processes, i.e.,material process, mental process, relational process, behavioral process, verbal process andexistential process. The interpersonal function means that language has the role and functionof expressing interpersonal relationships during communication. According to Halliday(2000), when we speak with different purposes, speakers will perform different “speech roles”and, at the same time, assign to the listener a complementary role to act. It describes the information exchange between communicators and mood&modality are two main aspects ofit. Through interpersonal function, the social status, communicative intention and motivationof the communicators can be revealed.The data analysis reveals the following findings:Firstly, in ideational function, the material process is the most frequently used processamong all the six processes in sports news discourses and it totally take up65.14%of thecorpus. It aims to describe the specific sports events and give the readers the authenticinformation concerning what happened and who is involved in these sports events. Then theverbal process and relational process are the next two frequently used processes, which takeup14.68%and13.76%respectively and employ quotation and “be” pattern to gain objectivity,authenticity and relationship description of sports news discourses. Mental process andexisting process are occasionally used to express the mental activities of athletes and existingfacts of sports events respectively. Behavioral process is used only in several specificcompetition descriptions to give more vivid pictures of sports events, so as to gain interestsand liveliness of the sports news discourses.Secondly, in mood, on the one hand, the declarative mood is the dominating mood insports news discourses and it takes up97.19%to normally describe the sports event. Theinterrogative mood and exclamative mood are occasionally used to express the doubt of thewriter or athlete and also the exclamation of them on the sports event. The imperative mood isseldom used in sports news discourses. On the other hand, the past tense is the dominatingtense in sports news discourses and takes up69.12%to mainly describe what sports event hashappened in the past. The present tense takes up28.68%, which makes the readers feel thatthey are reading the most recent news which happened or even is now happening. The futuretense is occasionally used to give the readers the athletes’ competition arrangementinformation in the next competition stages. In modality, some special expressions-modal verbs,modal adjuncts and appraisable words are powerful and play an important role in thejudgment of probabilities and obligations of sports events. |
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