The Generic Structure Potential Of Newspaper Editorials

Most of the studies of news editorials rest on the surface-level description of language features, yet seldom touch upon the deep-level features of news editorials as an important and frequent communicative activity, so news editorials are worthy of being studied from the new perspective of genre analysis, which will provide us with more satisfactory "thick" description and explanation, thus help us know well how a text is organized and why it is organized as it is.Within the theoretical framework of genre analysis, this thesis attempts to investigate news editorials as a branch of persuasive genre thoroughly, which includes analyzing and rationalizing their move structures and generic structure potential. By doing so, it not only provides a full view of news editorials but also illustrates how people realize their communicative purposes with language and why they write in the way they do.At first, the thesis surveys the communicative purposes of news editorials. Then based on the framework of Swalesian school, it comes up with the move structure manipulated by expert editorialists; in order to fulfill the communicative purposes, a piece of news editorial will contain the moves, including "Pertinent Headline", "Addressing an Issue", "Introducing Background Information", "Initiation of Argumentation", "Argument", "Closure of Argumentation", and "Indicating a Position".Then based on Hasan's theory of generic structure potential, the author summarizes the generic structure potential of news editorials as follows: 1) the move "Pertinent Headline" is obligatory and must precede the elements to its right; 2) the move "Addressing an Issue" is obligatory and the move "Introducing Background Information" is optional. If the latter occurs, it may precede or follow "Introducing Background Information; 3) both "Initiation of Argumentation" and "Closure of Argumentation" are optional, while "Argument" is obligatory and iterative. If it occurs, "Initiation of Argumentation" must precede "Argument" and "Closure of...