| As a kind of register, English sports news has become an indispensable part in our cultural life. While compared with poetry, novel, drama etc., English sports news has not enjoyed its due attention. There has not been such a systematical and comprehensive analysis of the language of English sports news.A sports news reporting consists of headline, lead and body. When we read a newspaper, headline is the most probable thing that comes first into sight. A headline has two requirements to capture the essence of the event and to attract readers'attention. Leads are the first one or two paragraphs of a news story. A lead must also catch the core of the event and lure readers into the story. A lead includes a summary of the most important material. It tells the reader what to expect. The remainder of the story-the body-gives examples and explains the beginning. It contains background and secondary material. The ending of the body often sums up the story.Based on the theory of foregrounding in Systemic-Functional Grammar, comparing it with the language of English political news, and making use of pragmatics and discourse analysis theory, this thesis attempt to analyze the stylistic features of English sports news.The concept of foregrounding originally belonged to painting to mean those outstanding parts against background. In the 1930s, Prague School linguists applied it to linguistics to emphasize the importance of deviation which is so special that draws people's attention. Later, Leech and Short developed it to include both the deviant features as well as those which are not deviant, but nevertheless striking. Halliday, an authority on linguistics, developed the theory further now and regarded it as"motivated prominence"from the angle of function. The function of language in a certain context is consistent with the usage of language and reveals the communicative purposes and objects of the speakers. Different understanding results in different division of the language functions. Language is to fulfill various functions in a certain situational context. That is to say, foregrounding is style. Foregrounding is the opposite of automatization, that is, the de-automatization of an act. Automatization schematizes an event; foregrounding means the violation of the scheme. Readers'attention can be retained through the foregrounded features of the discourse. Two ways can be used to achieve foregrounding, namely, the intentional departure from the norm of the standard and the overregular use of the norm.Graphologically, there are mass uses of capitalizations, short paragraphs and numerous punctuations in English sports news. Lexically, sports reporters make use of lot of abbreviations, coinages, loan words, nicknames ect. in English sports news. At grammatical level, sentences and words in English sports news are very short; sports reporters mainly use the simple present and past tenses and the active voice. English sports news are cohesive, deductive and creative at semantic level. All in all, all of the devices used in English sports news operate to achieve simplicity, informality and impact, to inform people in an attractive way, to help realize the attractive function of sports news.The present thesis probes into the patterns and linguistic resources that media texts adopt in the process of their construction. The purpose of this study is to explore the linguistic realizations of foregrounding in sports news reporting based on a functional-stylistic approach and consequently try to shed light on the teaching of writing and appreciation of sports news reporting. It is hoped that knowledge of the structures of language increases our understanding of how language provides a rich resource for creativity and bring joys for anyone who is interested in sports news reporting.
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