A Study Of Linguistic Features Of Hard News In English Newspaper

In the modern society of information, the newspaper is still an important way for people to learn about the outside world and acquire information, and thus it plays an important role in people's life. Its fresh and rich language and updated topics everyday provide an indispensable source of linguistic data. There is a wide range of varieties in reporting information, including hard news, features, comments, readers' letters, and advertisements. Among them, hard news is the essential one, because it represents the central function of a newspaper, that is, to inform.The reporters and readers of newspaper achieve the interaction of information through the news though not face to face. In the course of interaction, hard news has its own communicative characteristics, such as informing, objectivity, authority, accuracy, credibility, simplicity and readability. These communicative characteristics are represented through linguistic features in hard news text. For example, to inform the readers about the latest events in the shortest time, the priority information is put at the beginning, followed by quotations and comments from authoritative people; frequent use of the neutral speech word "say" in the quotation achieves the requirement of objectivity; accurate figures make news both accurate and credible; the avoidance of hard words and the coinage phenomenon in hard news improve the readability of the texts.Combining the stylistics and genre analyses, the thesis investigates the communicative characteristics and the linguistic features at the levels of textual structure, semantics, grammar, lexis and graphology. The thesis takes as its base the hard news in "New York Times" together with numerous data from previous research done by other scholars.The author hopes this kind of linguistic description can give people a clear picture on how language serves communication, make writers and readers understand each other best and help non-native speakers to be familiar with the pattern of newspaperlanguage and lead them to an easy access to English newspaper reading.