| Newspaper, as one of the most popular media around the world, serves as a mirror of the society, providing us with the immediate information on events home and abroad. The reportage of the news not only reflects the sutble changes of language style, but also records the birth and the extinction of language expressions. Thus, the diachronic study of English news reporting can be of great significance since it is helpful in understanding the flux of language and the impact of society on language as well.Beginning with the carrying out of reform and opening up policy, China has made great achievements in the past two decades. China Daily, as the most influential English newspaper in China, is worth researching for its changes in reporting style to witness the development of Chinese society. Abided by corpus compilation principles, two self-established sub-corpora have been built, each consisting of front-page articles of China Daily in 1982 and 2007, in order to answer the following questions:(1) Are there any changes in reporting style of China Daily during the past 25 years? If there are, what are they?(2) What causes could these changes reflect in terms of social factors and existent ideologies in news reporting?Weaving the corpus-based approach together into the critical discourse analysis approach, more detailed analysis is made to explore the changes of English news discourse in China in the span of 25 years from the aspect of three metafunctions of language. Findings are described to analyze the existent changes in reporting style and their possible causes. The paper concludes with a summary of its statistic data with the purpose to show directions for future studies on the subject. It is hoped that the current research might reinforce EFL learners'awareness of language complexity as well as the relationship between language and society. |
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