A Study On Textual Functions Of News Text

Journalistic discourse is an indispensable medium of this modern society, and it has great effect on people's social life. As an important variety, it is of great significance to conduct some research on journalistic discourse from the perspective of linguistics. There are many studies on journalistic discourse, but most of these studies are done from the lexical, syntacic or rhetorical perspectives. This dissertation is trying to analyze the reporting text, that is the news text, with the pattern of textual function analysis which is on the basis of Systemic-Funcional Grammar(SFG).This paper consists of six parts as follows .Chapter one is the part of introduction. First it explains the concept of journalism, and introduces the achievements of contemporary research, with reviews on this study. At the same, this chapter introduces the objective and the method of the study and the sources of corpus that the research is based on.Chapter two is a brief introduction of the theoretical background, which explains the concepts related to the research, and interprets the reason of conducting the study in the framework of Systemic-Functional Granmmar. The practice of discourse analysis proves that the theory of SFG offers a more precise theoretical framework to news text analysis.Chapter three focuses on the analysis of theme choice and theme patterns of news according to the theory of Theme-Rheme and Theme pattern, and quantitative analysis method is applied. It mainly explains the material method of this study, involving micro method, macro principle and the process. Quantitative analysis is adopted to study these Chinese News texts collected for the research, then quantitative results are shown by the charts. At the same time, there is a detailed description of the results . All these are conducted to find out the rules that how News text is comosing.Chapter four is a study of the information strcture of News text at text angle and clause angle.Chapter five focuses on the analysis of cohesion from lexical cohesion and grammatical cohesion .Chapter six is the conclusion. In this chapter, the author makes a review of the theoretical basis, summarizes the content of the research and results of the analysis, and meanwhile points out the limitations of the study .