A Pragmatic Explanation Of English Disaster News Reports

Nowadays, natural disasters keep threatening to the society at-large and have unavoidably aroused a great deal of public attention. News about disasters becomes the focus of people's concern not only in everyday life but also gains attention in the research field often due to the fact that it produces enormous negative effect. In the linguistic field, disaster news has been explored mainly from the perspective of stylistic study and critical linguistic approach. This thesis, however, attempts to break through the traditional research modes and tries to adopt a different perspective to investigate disaster news reports extracted from China Daily, People's Daily, The New York Times, and The Washington Post under the framework of speech act theory and perspective taking theory.In this thesis, news reporting is considered as a reporting act involving both the news media and the reader. The media might be performing three acts simultaneously when reporting:locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act, of which illocutionary act transmits their real intention and attitudes. Based on the analysis of a wealth of collected data, this thesis tries to answer the following three questions:1) What are the illocutionary acts in disaster news reports? 2) What are the perspectives taken in disaster news reports? 3) What are the functions served by disaster news reports?Based on the analysis of the illocutionary acts and the reporting perspectives in disaster news reports, the author draws the following conclusions:there are four illocutionary acts and there are also indirect speech acts in disaster news reports; four different reporting perspectives are often found to be taken in disaster news reports; through further analysis, the author finds that choosing different language devices and different reporting perspectives can convey different intentions and emotions of the news writers, and makes a summary of the functions served by disaster news reports: social function, interpersonal function, and emotional function. The above findings are especially helpful for a better understanding of the ways how the news media convey their intention and emotions to influence people's judgments, attitudes and feelings and are useful for building a more critical awareness in the readers for them to identify the real intention of the journalists and media workers. This study has also provides a different perspective for further studies of disaster news reports and many other sub-genres of news reports.