| As globalization becomes increasingly maturer and media greatly enriches people's spiritual life, sports event earns wide favor from personages from all walks of life and goes international. Many newspapers with global influence have opened columns for sports news; up till now, sports news has become the third biggest sub-genre of news. However, at the present, attention on sports news from linguistics field has been quite scarce. Among the limited number of previous researches on sports news, most of them were conducted from the perspective of traditional stylistics. Therefore, in this thesis, the author intended to make a discourse analysis of sports news on basis of ideational function in the Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) and attitude system in appraisal theory proposed by Martin to compliment the interpersonal function in the SFG. To be more specific, transitivity system (material processes, relational processes, verbal processes, mental processes, behavioral processes and existential processes) and voice system (middle voice, active voice and passive voice) in the SFG and attitude system (Affect, Judgment, and Appreciation) in appraisal theory were discussed and adopted as the theoretical framework for this study.Twenty pieces of sports news in English on the topic of Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup 2010 Finals were chosen from China Daily and the New York Times as study object, and statistic results of each linguistic resource were calculated before the qualitative analysis of data were conducted.In this thesis, four questions were raised: 1. what is the distribution and proportion of each transitivity process in sports news in China Daily and New York Times? What are their respective functions? 2. What is the distribution of voice system in the two newspapers? What are the functions of middle and non-middle voices? 3. How is evaluation realized in sports news in the two newspapers from the perspective of attitude system? 4. What are the similarities and differences between sports news in China Daily and the New York Times from perspectives of ideational function and evaluation? Do the journalists convey hidden information or personal tendency besides reporting sports news objectively?After the observation, calculation and analysis were conducted on the selected samples, findings of the study were drawn. They are: (1) In transitivity analysis, material processes prevail in sports news in English, followed by relational processes, verbal processes, mental processes, behavioral processes and existential processes in sequence; (2) in voice analysis, active voice occupies a dominant place, followed by middle and passive voice, and; (3) In sports news in English, Affect occupies the least percentage. Appreciation takes up a dominant proportion in China Daily reports while Judgment is the main appraisal resource in New York Times; (4) when it comes to the two newspapers'similarity and difference, the percentage of material processes in China Daily report is higher than that in New York Times report, so does active voice; attitude resources in New York Times are more widely distributed than those in China Daily, so does negative attitude's distribution. In the two newspapers, journalists all convey their hidden information and personal tendency but differ with degree, with more in the New York Times and less in China Daily, and they express those hidden information mainly through making evaluation on the match and players'performance.The significance of the research lies threefold: first, it is a combination of linguistic theory and practice; second, it broadens linguistic research subject by conducting discourse analysis on sports news in English, which has been neglected by many linguistic researchers; third, it is a scientific study of quantitative study and qualitative study. However, when conducting the research, the author didn't take textual metafunction in the SFG and other two subsystems in the appraisal theory into consideration, which determined that the research is not an all-round one. Besides, there is also limitation in the author's comprehension of the theories, and all those previous factors together form the research's significance and limitation. |
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