| Sports play an important role in social and cultural life of human society. With the development of economy and the enhancement of international communication, sports are attracting more and more attention. Many newspapers bear pages of sports edition, releasing the sports news reporting. However, people always find it is not easy to comprehend what is covered when reading sports news, harder still for those in another language. This does not mean sports news is of extra obscurity. Journalistic English for sports has its unique features. Compared with other registers, sports news reporting has not enjoyed its due attentions. Few works concerning a systematic and comprehensive analysis of its language features could be found in the linguistic circle. The present thesis is an attempt to analyze the language features of sports news reporting systematically on the basis of the theory of foregrounding. Sports news from The Times, The Guardian, The Washington Times, and The 21st Century are collected as the data base of the research and analysis is conducted at phonological, lexical, syntactic and semantic levels. At the phonological level, foregrounding is fulfilled through the reoccurrence of the identical sound. The deviation of abbreviations, coinage and sense-shift attain lexical foregrounding, and the frequent uses of the short words and numbers also realized foregrounding in journalistic English for sports. At the syntactic level, foregrounded features are embodied in the frequent use of active voice, quotations, and the tenses. Foregrounding at the semantic level principally turns up in the sports news reporting. It is the uses of metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy and pun that help to bring the potential of the linguistic elements into a full play. |
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