| This thesis attempts to complete a comparatively thorough and systematic analysisof journalistic English on the basis of Halliday's systemic-functional stylistics theories.Hard news is generally regarded as the core news product in newspapers, so it ischosen to be the focus of the study. 15 hard news reports are collected randomly fromfive eminent quality official newspapers: The New York Times, USA Today, WashingtonPost, Guardian and The Times, which share the similar readership and large circulation.Both empirical and qualitative approaches are adopted to analyze them.The analysis of journalistic English is presented from perspectives of the threemeta-functions, i.e. ideational, interpersonal and textual. It offers an investigation onhow context of situation limits and motivates functional choices and how thefore-grounded news features such as factuality, brevity, timeliness, informationcondensation, etc. are assigned to lexico-grammatical or structural level of the text torealize the three meta-functions by transitivity system, mood and modality system,theme structure, information system and cohesion system.The thesis reveals that Halliday's systemic-functional stylistics theory offers a trulybeneficial perspective in the understanding of journalistic English.
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