| News gives people information and knowledge about the environment we live in, and it is also a channel to study languages and interpersonal relationship. People need news to make themselves more informative, especially in today's fast-pace life. News language is one of the best parts of human languages, embodying human wisdom. The cognitive interpretation of the understanding of news discourse, therefore, becomes one of the intensely researched areas of language study. A lot of studies have been conducted in detail from perspectives of pragmatics, rhetoric and psychological cognition, generating abundant fruits.News discourse also possesses unique quality, competence and communicative mode of human beings, while the language is human beings'unique ability and communication tool. Information's creation is usually achieved by the language. Therefore, we can get better information by studying news discourse. Such kind of study can also help us to make social progress.As for discourse analysis, the study abroad is mainly conducted in physiology, linguistics, psychology, sociology, etc. The most influential ones are three theories put forward from the perspective of linguistics:distribution analysis, speech act theory and Halliday's Systemic Metafunctional Grammar. Distribution analysis focuses on the analysis of lexical and semantic units rather than the cohesion and coherent sentences. But this theory is not practical in discourse analysis. Speech act theory attempts to explain how speakers use language to accomplish intended actions and how listeners infer intended meaning from what is said. Although speech act studies are now considered a sub-discipline of cross-cultural pragmatics, they actually take their origin in the philosophy of language. It puts a weight on the discourse analysis. Systemic functional grammar is concerned primarily with the choices the grammar makes available to speakers and writers. These choices relate speakers'and writers'intentions to the concrete forms of language. Traditionally the "choices" are viewed in terms of the content or the structure of the used language. In SFG, language is analyzed in three different ways (strata):semantics, phonology, and lexicogrammar. SFG presents a view of language in terms of both structure (grammar) and words (lexis). To sum up, these three discourse-analyzing theories offer a good theoretical basis for analyzing the discourse of broadcast news.The domestic study of discourse analysis was started in 1980s and tended to be multi-angled and multi-leveled since 1990s. Scholars'studies are mainly in linguistics, pragmatics, rhetoric and stylistic, but it is inevitable that the repeated study appears at the same time. The domestic study of discourse analysis is usually conducted from perspectives of deixis, the cooperative principle, and the relevance theory, etc. But the researches of discourse analysis in China are still in an early step because of lacking materials and collections.This article makes quantitative and qualitative analysis of English broadcast news discourse from the angles of lexis, syntax, theme, rheme, information structure and Halliday's functional grammar to reveal the characteristics of broadcast news discourse, and to give help and enlightenment to English learners and news writers. All the instances are picked out from VOA, BBC and CNN news.This thesis introduces the definition of discourse and the news discourse, the characteristics of discourse, as well as the inclusion relationship between discourse and news discourse. Thus the theories and methods we always use to analyze discourse can be also applied to the analysis on news discourse. In this part, the author introduces the origin of discourse analysis and some relative analytical procedures, such as distribution analysis, which was proposed by Harris in early time, but distribution analysis has no substantial functions to discourse analysis. In addition, in this part, the author also makes an introduction to Halliday's Systemic Metafunctional Grammar and some other essential theories appeared in 1970s. All these theories make the fundamental of discourse analysis. Then the author makes a comprehensive analysis of news discourse.Firstly, the author introduces the lexical density in this thesis. It is a kind of new method to measure how much meaningful information is included in news, and in lexical analysis on the discourse of broadcast news, it has several features that it is common that we always see powerful words, contraction words and acronyms are used in news reports. Besides, nouns are always used as attributives to save reporting time and make the reports briefer. Numerals always appear in news to dedicate the scientific and authentic characteristics of news. Fuzzy terms and hedges are also used to show the respect of practice and facts.Secondly, the author makes the syntactic analysis on the discourse of broadcast news. In this part, we can see some syntactic features of broadcast news. Usually, there are more expressions and fewer sentences are used in broadcast news. Of course, we use both simple sentences and complete sentences to enrich the news. Assertive sentences have absolute advantages in news reporting. Furthermore, it is common to see the appositions used in news. This phenomenon usually occurs to introduce an important person or an organization in news. Besides, there is also an interesting form in news that we usually use an inanimate subject plus an animate verb, which makes news sound more vividly.Thirdly, this thesis analyzes several instances in broadcast news from the perspective of theme, rheme and information structure. In this part, it changes our traditional opinion that the theme should be corresponding to given information, while the rheme should be corresponding to unknown information. That because broadcast news is a kind of discourse containing large information. In this part, the author explains and analyzes seven patterns of theme-theme structure offered by Huang Guangwen.Fourthly, the author makes the analysis on English broadcast news in context by Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar. In this thesis, we mainly focus on transitivity and modeling theories. By utilizing the two different aspects of Systemic Functional Grammar, this thesis analyzed the news examples in terms of their communicative functionality; that is, how each text seeks to deal with potentially contentious propositions, how it acts to win over audience to its particular evaluative position, and how its lexico-grammatical and text organizational choices serve to lend more or less covert support to the particular stance each news reporter adopts. The result not merely showed how skillfully the writers utilize various news resources to achieve their purposes but it also demonstrated how powerful analytical tools Systemic Functional Grammar can be in analyzing news discourse.There have been quite a few studies done on the semantic properties and syntactic behaviors of Chinese modal expressions. However, no comprehensive framework addressing the pragmatic aspect has been formulated. With the growing awareness of the importance of equally stressing the semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic factors in the account of linguistic features, this project aims at uncovering the pragmatic forces of Chinese modal expressions. Epistemic modals are used to express the speaker's confidence toward the truth of a situation, while the goal of news reports is to convey what the mass media know or believe to be truth. Both relate to the truth value of a proposition. Therefore, this project proposes to investigate the pragmatic functions of Chinese epistemic modals in the register of news reports.The relation between epistemic modals and the news register exhibits the interaction between grammatical features and situational uses. With regards to grammatical features, epistemic modals have two sub-systems. One is Judgment, involving Conjecture, Assertive and Alethic; the other is Evidentials, of which Quotative and Sensation are members. Though modals of different categories have similar meanings, they achieve diverse pragmatic purposes. Overall, epistemic modal expressions appear most frequently in society news, which involve the objective description of an event and the subjective reflection of the reporter. The former is characterized by Assertive, Alethic, and Sensation, while the latter tends to be depicted by Conjecture. In politics news, Conjecture is often used to infer the future direction of political events, while Assertive characterizes events wherein the cause has been specified. In finance and economics news, Quotative is most common, but those with support of statistics are featured by Assertive.In this thesis, the author makes a comparison on transitivity and modeling used in Chinese and English broadcast news. In the comparison, we can see that the purpose of modal verbs used in Chinese news carries more communicative functions, which is especially applied in political news, while the modal verbs used in English broadcast news focus more on explanation of the news reporter's own intention. This is the greatest difference between the modeling used in Chinese news and English news. But in the perspective of transitivity of Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar, we can see the similarity of Chinese broadcast news and English broadcast news that the power distance in the participants in news. This is very helpful to those who are the language learners, and this rule also provides a new concept to the international news reporters to make their news reporting more elaborate. |
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