| Sports, the sign of social civilization, is an indispensable part of our social and cultural life. Therefore, the development of sports enjoys a universal attention, especially sports games. Today, the sports section often makes up as much as one quarter of some daily newspapers. Millions upon millions of news are printed each year about sports. Thus, sports news occupies a very important place in our daily life. But a systemic and comprehensive analysis of the language of sports news has not been well attempted. Based on the theories of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Stylistics, and on some analytical methods of Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis, this study has attempted to analyze the language of sports news in a number of actual examples from several famous English newspapers. The whole thesis falls into five parts:Chapter one gives a brief overview to the former linguistic analysis of sports news, and explains the writing purpose of the thesis is to give a systemic and comprehensive analysis of sports news from five levels: grammatical, lexical, semantic, graphological and textual.Chapter two discusses the general features of news language in terms of field, mode and tenor, makes a concise and perspicuouscomparison between traditional and present sports news, and analyzes the general features of sports news, a sub-genre of news language, by using two samples of straight sports news from The Times, "the most historic, authoritative and influential English newspaper in the world" (æŽæž—厚, 1979:81), and The Sunday Times, the weekend edition of The Times. Chapter three locates the core of this work, in which more examples of sports news, not only from The Times and The Sunday Times, but from The Washington Post, The Sunday Express, The Mirror, The Sun and The guardian, are listed for giving prominence to the stylistic features of sports news. On the one hand, it describes the linguistic features of sports news at the level of grammar, lexis, semantics, graphology and text respectively; on the other, it studies the overall linguistic features of sports news in terms of their relation to their context of occurrence, i.e. to some extent, we can take sports writers and readers as addresser and addressee to study the potential reasons why sports writers write sports news in a certain way. Chapter four presents a concrete description and comparison of the other three main varieties of sports news: depth reporting, feature story and column. They are classified on the basis of various writingpurposes of sports news writers and the relationship among sports news writers, sports news and readers. The last chapter ends the work with such a conclusion: sports news are indubitably worked by the general "context" and, as such, must be seen as complex stylistic devices which, rather than a collection of numbers or a simple description of victory and loss, construct them.The problem is that more and more of the new techniques introduced in newspapers are being taken over by television programs and internet websites. It remains to be seen whether this will lead to a coexistence of similar presentational strategies in newspapers, television programs and internet websites, or whether newspapers will soon have to look for new forms of presentation to justify their existence vis-à -vis TV, computer and other types of mass media.In one word, my wish with this thesis is that readers do love the writing of sports news. If it could spark readers' interest in sports, thereby they would take part in sports actively, no matter walking inside or running outside, my ardor of writing on this subject will be well rewarded.
|
PDF Full Text Request