A Comparative Study Of Stylistic Features Between English News Reports In Heavy And Mass Newspapers

China has become a member of WTO, hence the economic and cultural exchange with foreign countries is increasing. All messages and new things are represented in the mass media and one of the traditional media for news' transmitting is the newspaper. The newspaper, as a more stable written form, is becoming more and more indispensable in people's life. As a part of public life, this form of media has borrowed words, phrases or expressions from society and at the same time generated a lot of new language form and usage that will, in turn, influence people's everyday life. News language has developed into a branch of modern stylistics. Recently more and more attention has been directed to the study of news English and contributed to steady progress in this field. Though much has been completed concerning the stylistic analysis of news reporting, the comparison of the styles between the English news reports of the heavy papers and mass papers has hitherto not been done much. Thus such a comparison has been attempted in this thesis.This thesis involves the stylistic comparison between the English news reports of the heavy papers — The New York Times; USA Today; Pensacola News Journal and those of mass papers — Sun; The National Enquirer; National Examiner. Through the comparison it has been perceived that many similarities exist. There are also differences, of which many readers are conscious but may not be able to explicitly describe and explain. The similarities and differences existing between the English news reports of heavy papers and mass papers are anticipated to be of some assistance to English learners and journalists. The analysis reveals that the linguistic differences are existent chiefly at the graphological, lexical, syntactic and semantic levels.The practical significance of this study is to indicate the similarities and differences between the English news reports of heavy papers and those of mass papers, and therefore newspaper readers might be more efficient in their learning and acquisition in the future with the awareness of the similarities and differences and their causes.