Genre Analysis Of Narrating In English Newspaper Hard News

The word genre comes from the French word for "kind" or "class". It is a very important term in a number of fields as rhetoric, literature, media, and more recently, linguistics, used to refer to a text type. It becomes more prevalent in the past two or three decades. The areas of investigation where the notion of genre has recently received attention are diverse and the scholars in these areas have put forward various genre theories. Based on their research a lot of genre analysis practice has been carried out. Genre analysis is concerned with either to find out structures and formal linguistic rules or to examine how ideology is related with the form of the writing, or to identify how contexts interacts with a genre. These theories seem not adequate enough to disclose the true appearance of genre. Hence, a new definition as well as a comprehensive genre analysis model is in great need.On the basis of a penetrating survey of the previous definitions of genre and genre analysis models, such as genre in folklore studies, genre in literary studies, and genre in linguistic studies, etc. it is found that genre is a dynamic, hierarchical, contextualized, social communicative practice rather than a formulaic. homogeneous, decontextualized text type. According to these dominant features of genre, by resorting to the theories of Miller, Martin, Halliday, Swales, Austin etc. the author proposes a new definition of genre, i.e. genre is a convention of social process to do things not only to accomplish locutionary purpose but also to accomplish illocutionary purpose in a particular context. Virtually, these two processes are interrelated and are simultaneously carried out. Such a definition makes genre concrete and makes us focus not only on what is being done in a text for locutionary purpose, i.e. to construct meaning, but also, internally on how genre uses some linguistic tools to achieve its illocutionary purpose, i.e. to transmit value and ideology. In this way, it calls for an integrative genre analysis approach.To meet this requirement, the author proposes an integrative genre analysismodel, namely, to analyze genre in social-functional and critical perspectives. From socio-functional perspective, how genre constructs meaning is figured out while from the critical perspective, how genre constructs value or ideology is laid bare. The reason for me to adopt the social-functional perspective is that the socio-functional perspective on what the text and the clause are doing is trinocular, namely, how they are constructed to make meaning: about something, interacting with somebody and phasing information. The reason for me to adopt the critical perspective is to deconstruct how a genre employs some linguistic and appraisal resources to construct value or ideology. This does not mean that genre construct meaning first and value second. Virtually, the two processes are simultaneously carried out and are interrelated. The demarcation that I mark out here is to deconstruct the two processes so that we can have a better understanding of a genre. In order to prove the feasibility of the new definition of genre and the integrative genre theory, a systemic analysis is given to the dominant genre: narrating in English newspaper hard news. At both the clause level and the text level, the analysis exposes that narrating genre, by employing some language resource, not only fulfills the locutionary purpose to construct meaning, but also fulfills the illocutionary purpose to embed some values or ideology in the news. Another significance of the study is that it can help us to percept the true sense of English news.