News Comments Discourse Language Study

Mediated discourse has become increasingly powerful in the contemporary language life. As an indispensable part of mediated discourse, news commentary plays a significant role in guiding the public opinion and maintaining the mainstream value. News commentary is examined as a particular discourse in the communication of Han nation by drawing upon concepts and theories of Functional Linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics, speech act theory, discourse analysis, and literary theory.The dissertation holds that discourses under different circumstances share some similarities, though each of them relates to a concrete speech communication. Hence they can be grouped together. And it mainly focuses on the contexts, the text structure, the functional feature and the in-depth rhetoric mechanism of news commentary.The essay includes nine chapters with more than 170,000 characters in total.In chapter one, the introduction consists in the research objects, the range of arguments, the explanation of the corpora's origin and reviews former research.The second chapter is a survey of news commentary, which explains the definition, characteristics, social function of news commentary and also redefines the news commentary discourse. Then the context of news commentary discourse is examined with some concepts of Functional Linguistics, including the three elements—field, tenor, and mode. This part is, actually, the starting point of the whole dissertation.Chapter three to five concentrates on the language characteristics of news commentary discourse, which includes the title, diction, sentence, discourse structure and cohesion. The structure and function of the title will be analyzed. With a descriptive approach, dictions, sentences, discourse structure and cohesion are studied by drawing upon theories of Functional Linguistics. Comparative approach is used in dealing with different discourse types. The last part is on the narration and arguments of this discourse.Chapter six and seven discusses the different ingredients, like different discourse subjects and language varieties, in news commentary discourse. This part borrows the concept—"inter-textuality" in literary theory and examines structure, discourse function and essential characteristics of these different ingredients.The eighth chapter focuses on the speech act of news commentary. "Persuasion" in the news commentary discourse will be analyzed.Chapter nine, the conclusion, summarizes main ideas of the thesis. Limitations and subjects for further research are discussed.