Discourse Analysis Of Online News English

Since the late 1980s, English news media from foreign countries have increasingly internationalized, with strong impacts on China's news media, especially through the Internet. The present and future needs in China for external propagation and internal English education have aroused a vigorous tendency of English media development, in particular, English news media.The Internet has become a major source of news in today's world, as a result of the rapid development of economy and information technologies. People like its convenience, availability, its speed of delivering breaking news, and increasingly they are coming to trust the accuracy of the information they receive there. The easy access to online English news has provided a large amount of original materials for this thesis.This thesis aims at a tentative study of the discursive features of online news English, on the basis of van Dijk's theory of news schemata, with news reports collected from three major English news sites as the corpus.Discourse analysis theoretically involves almost all levels or dimensions of linguistic (grammatical) analysis, such as analysis of word, word group, sequence, clause, sentence, semantics, style and rhetoric, and in this respect discourse analysis is equated with linguistics. However, given all the complexities of online news English which includes texts, pictures, audio and video materials, it is of difficulty to give a thorough account of all aspects of such a "multi-media" discourse type. Previous discourse analysis of online English news has focused on the micro-levels such as lexical, syntactic, local cohesion and coherence analysis, and some even probe into the technologies of the news websites, while hardly any has focused on analysis from the global perspective.This thesis attempts to give a systematic account of the global form and content...