Language Function And Foregrounding: An Insight Into Language Of English News Reporting

Never before have linguistic researches attempted to combine language function and foregrounding theory to analyze news reporting texts. Previous studies about news discourse usually focuses on the social context of news,or on the textual structure only. Little work has been done on the relationship between context and language of news. Moreover,the functions of language are often neglected.Therefore,this dissertation is meant to supply the gap by presenting a comparatively thorough and systematic analysis of news reporting on the basis of Halliday's language function and foregrounding theory.Foregrounding has evolved from Mukarovsky to Halliday. The common ground among linguists before Halliday is that foregrounding only occurs in literary text,and the effect of foregrounding is to create oddness,to achieve defamiliarization;literary language is a departure from the norm (Webster,1995). This idea is often objected because it puts too high a value on oddness,and suggest that normal forms are of no interest in the study of style.Halliday,from a functional point of view,defines foregrounding as " prominence that is motivated" (Halliday,1998:64). He makes a further explanation of motivated prominence:a feature that is brought into prominence will have stylistic value only if it relates to the meaning of the text as a whole. Then it can be considered as 'foregrounded' (ibid.). The meaning of a text resides in the sort of foregrounding that is achieved by environmentally motivated prominence,in which certain sets of options are favored . This theory is meant to explain why language is as it is,and avoid the assumption that a linguistic feature which is brought under attention will always be seen as a 'departure',and it is valuable in general for the insight it gives into stylistic studies.Halliday distinguishes three linguistic functions:the ideational,the interpersonal,and the textual. Each component of the language network corresponds to one of the functions. Any kind of linguistic pattern,once it is the realization of any of the functions of the whole text,it is 'foregrounded '.This dissertation is an attempt to interpret language of English news reporting,based on Halliday's theory of language function and foregrounding. There are three leading ideas of the process:first,language has a tristratal system:semantics,lexicogrammar,phonology/graphology. Each option at one level is motivate by that at a higher level;second,the context of situation is the motivation for linguistic option;third,language option motivated by context of situation is at the same time representation of three functions.Both empirical and qualitative approaches are adopted to analyze the corpus. The material of the empirical part of the study comes from many authoritative experts in this domain. Furthermore,specific examples are studied to illustrate how they realize specific language functions.This dissertation falls into five chapters. The first part serves as an introduction of the main concern of news reporting,the previous studies of news reporting,and the methodology adopted. The second part expounds the theoretical background for the whole dissertation. The third part examines foregrounded semantic features and some major foregrounding linguistic devices in news reporting discourse. The fourth part analyzes from a functional point of view how prominence is motivated,the relationship between context of situation and linguistic forms,and how particular linguistic forms favored in ENR realize language function. The fifth part closes the whole dissertation with the expectation that the study should provide an advisable insight into stylistic studies in others domains.