How Headline And Body Related In Chinese Case News: A Systemic-Functional Perspective

21st century is an information era, people get to know the outside world through various ways, such as newspaper, magazine, newscast, TV, radio and so on. As the improvement of the social legal institutions, the law provides the public with behavioral norm, which makes illegal behaviors be punished in time and lays a foundation for the social development. However, the public are unwilling to spend much time reading and studying those dull legal clauses which they are unfamiliar with, that results in the happening of illegal cases. Then, how to make the public have more legal knowledge to restrain their behavior? The propagation of case news offers us the most effective way. On the one hand, case news is a kind of news, which is terse, forceful, brief and attractive, so it makes people have a full understanding of the origin, course and result of the latest case in least time. On the other hand, it makes the public distinguish between right and wrong through the narration of the case fact and the result of the adjudgment, so as to effectively obey and defend the law. All these burden would add to journalists'tasks. Then, how to make them report the latest case timely, accurately and effectively? If they know the relationship between the headline and the body of case news which could supply them with an ideological model during news writing, then, they can save the writing time with high quality.Both the headline and the body of case news narrate around a legal case, they can be regarded as independent parts respectively or as whole. In addition, people will get the general idea about the legal case from the headline and decide whether to read it. So, the headline and the body are closely related to each other. This thesis will explore their semantic and structural relationship with context theory.The author thinks that every discourse is meaningful in certain contexts (qtd. in Hu, 2005:26). The understanding of discourse cannot be departed from the study of context. Context refers to the physical environment in which a linguistic item is used. On the grounds of many scholars' notions, context tends to be classified into situational context...