The Stylistic Analysis Of Written English Disaster Reports

Stylistics is a branch of linguistics that studies language style. The goal of most stylistic studies is not simply to describe the formal features of text for their own sake, but to show their functional significance for the interpretation of the text; or in order to relate possible meanings or effects to linguistic "causes" where these are felt to be relevant.As a common type of way to acquire information, news reporting is favored by lots of people. Many works also conduct a very detailed description and summary of its style. Disaster news reporting is a vital part of news report and it is the best type of news that can reflect the alteration of objective world. Since the disaster events come without pre-warning or even without any anticipation, they can thus bring about great impact on every aspect of the society, and in turn have always been the focus of the public media attention. Reports of disaster events frequently published on mass media in recent years have led to people's concern and discussion. Through all the news development history at home and abroad, disaster news report, especially the written one, is the focus all along and plays an indispensable position of the news report.Recent years, the whole world, as well as China, suffered many disastrous events, such as SARS, earthquakes, tsunami, the gun attack and mine disasters etc. These events bring people sorrow, anxiety and panic. They have also exerted serious effect on China and the whole world. All the media report these events without delay, so people can know the latest news through the disaster news reporting, which hold more and more important position in people's heart.Disasters have their inherent newsiness, and that a proper coverage of disaster can play a unique role in the fighting and prevention of disasters, in ridding the public psychology of horror and in helping investigation the causes of disasters. The coverage itself has an obviously positive effect on the construction of law and democracy and on the creation of good image of a country.Since 1960s, news has been researched in the linguistics orientations with stylistic study and critical linguistics approach. Lots of works did detailed description on the stylistics of news. Being a special text type of news reporting, disaster news reporting has its own stylistic characteristics, combining stylistic features of news and those of common argumentation. The diction, sentence structures, organization and vocabulary in the disaster news reports are different from those of general English and ordinary English news reports. We think it's necessary to do further study on the sub-style of English news. The thesis attempts to systematically acquaint the English language learners with the stylistic characteristics of English disaster news report and thus to master the key information more efficiently. Meanwhile, expand the research field of news English and deepen our recognition of the stylistics.This thesis makes an inquiry into the characteristics of disaster news from style perspective. It attempts to analyze the specific characteristics of disaster news. In the thesis, also given is the theoretical background of stylistics, including the definition, research subjects, analysis methods, history and current situations of stylistic study, the researches on the disaster news already conducted by the linguists at home and abroad. The analysis generally follows three steps: Description (mainly linguistic) --- Interpretation --- Evaluation, and develop at the level of lexical, syntactic, text and context. The stylistic analysis in lexical level touches on the selection of words; while syntactic analysis mainly focuses the application of tense, voice, participle phrase, appositive etc.After analyzing the thirty written English disaster news reports, the author reveals the following stylistic features of written English disaster news reports: First, determined by its context of situation: English disaster news reports contain some special words such as "rock", "shock", "disaster", which are accurate, vivid and shocking; the frequently used tenses in it are the past tense, and the simple present tense and future tense are not often used due to the nature of English disaster news reports. English disaster news reports are characterized by formal written language instead of exhibiting features of spoken one. Second, the writers make good use of different language skills to make the reports vivid, forceful, impressive to influence the readers including the use of appositive clauses, participles, variety of sentence patterns and so on.This thesis hopes to be helpful to English disaster news writing and understanding of its function, and thus contribute to improve the appreciating ability of English disaster news and master the main information more quickly and accurately. Hope that this article can exert a little strength we have to the news English research and at the same time expand the stylistic analysis.