Functional Insight Into The Changing Style Of The News Reports Of The Times

Stylistics has benefited a lot from the development of modern linguistics since its birth. Meanwhile,Ferdinand de Saussure's viewpoint on synchronic and diachronic linguistics has greatly influenced most of the linguists and stylisticians. Diachronic analysis of style has been neglected for a long period of time. In recent decades,the researches on non-literary texts and colloquialism are fruitful,and accurate statistic methods have been introduced into stylistic analyses. This provides good conditions for the research on the change of style.This paper,depending on the theories of systemic-functional stylistics and professor Cheng Yumin's approach,aims to explore how and why the news reports of The Times changed in style in terms of the degree of formality during the 20th century.Style in this paper is meant to refer to the characteristics of a type of text in a certain period of time instead of genre or variety. Style is embodied in exact language elements. According to Enkvist & Spenser,any elements which can represent the typical features of a certain text are stylistic markers. This view is in accord with M. A. K. Halliday's viewpoint on "foregrounding". Halliday divides "foregrounding" into qualitative (negative) foregrounding and quantitative (positive) foregrounding. He believes that positive foregrounding is related to frequency and that if the style of a text,a writer or of a period is recognizable,the distinguishable characteristics,in the final analysis,can be examined by frequency. Styles change with time. In this regard,once made a clear analysis in hisbook Geoffrey Leech's deviations contain the historical deviation which is similar to the period stylo,by a Chinese scholar In this paper,the comparison of style is done in terms the degree of formality at three levels. Eight stylistic markers (paragraph length;contraction,acronym and word length;voice,the length and complexity of sentence,and the sentence pattern It is---that"-) are involved in section three for quantitative analyses. Section four aims to survey the change of context from a historical viewpoint.The analyses of the stylistic markers suggest that the news reports of The Times kept becoming less formal gradually in the last century. The change of context occurred in field as well as in tenor. The discussion about field indicates that the focus of topics changed with time. The falling degree of formality and impersonality together with the rising accessibility illustrate the change in tenor.The change of style results from many factors. In this paper,the strengthened functions of newspaper English,the simplification in language system and the cultural and social background are taken into consideration.The materials for concrete analyses are collected randomly from the news reports of The Times from 1900 to 2000. There are 220 pieces of news (310 pieces for the analysis of field),2320 sentences or 63100 words involved. The result of this research,according with people's intuition,has proved the feasibility of the present approach and the possibility for further diachronic researches on other varieties. In addition,diachronic researches should attempt to illustrate the change of style at textual level and semantic level. At last,diachronic and synchronic approaches should be combined in a more effective way.