Sports News English In Change

Sports are a sign of social civilization and an important component of social and cultural life of human beings. With the development of economy and increasingly closer international communication, sports attract more and more attention. Nowadays, many newspapers bear sports sections and even in some newspapers sports section occupies a proportion of twenty-five percent. Numerous sports news is released every day. Sports news English has become an independent variety with unique stylistic features due to its field, mode and tenor of discourse. However, compared with other varieties of English, sports news English has not enjoyed the attention it deserves.Stylistics, as an interdiscipline, has experienced a rapid development in the past few decades. Various new schools of stylistics are emerging, and stylistic analyses into different varieties have made substantial achievements. However, ever since the emergence of Saussure's structural linguistics, great emphasis has been put on the synchronic studies, which results in the fact that the diachronic research has not been attached its due importance to, not to mention diachronic stylistic research.This thesis, based on general stylistics, diachronically analyzes the sports news reports about the FIFA World Cup finals in The New York Times from the aspects of linguistic description, textual analysis and contextual factors analysis.The major findings of this thesis are as follows: graphologically, paragraphs in sports news reports are becoming comparatively longer, three-or-more-sentence paragraphs are gradually making more frequent appearances, quotation marks and apostrophes are employed more frequently; lexically, the use of first person pronouns and third person pronouns is more and more frequent, the percentage of favorable adjectives in sports news reports is decreasing, and the fog index of sports news reports is on the decrease; syntactically, the average sentence length is on the decrease, sentence types and tenses employed are becoming increasingly diversified, and the passive voice is only used in a limited scope in sports news English; textually, sports news reports are becoming longer and longer and the jump head prevalence makes subtitles disappear gradually; contextually, social changes in the aspects of the addresser and addressees as well as the subject of this study, FIFA World Cup, together play their role in the style changes of sports news English. To conclude, all these features contribute to style changes happening to the sport news English, making sports news English more objective, more impersonal, more informative, and more comprehensible to attract more and more potential readers.In a word, this diachronic study of the changes in sports news English aims to help people to better grasp the development tendency of sports news English, to know its features, and to make use of these features creatively so as to produce good sports news reports, and spark people's interest in sports. What is more, this thesis will be suggestive for further studies on sports news English, for the teaching of EFL in China as well as for the writing of sports news in English.