An Analysis Of English Economic News Discourse Based On Systemic-Functional Grammar And Genre Analysis

In the modern society of information, in order to meet the requirements of the rapideconomic and social development, English economic news which is closely related toour daily life, plays an increasingly important role in our lives. It has become a popularway for people to learn about international economy and acquire information.Meanwhile, the wave of globalization also promotes the rapid development of globaleconomy. Therefore, the research on English economic news reports on the one hand isthe basic requirement for economic majors; on the other hand, it is also practical forEnglish majors.This thesis attempts to analyze English economic news discourse by analyzing itsmicro-grammatical features and macro-structure. In the analysis of micro-grammaticalfeatures, this thesis employs Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar as its theoreticalsupports, and the study will summarize the specific linguistic characteristics from twoperspectives of ideational function and interpersonal function. In the analysis of themacro-structure of English economic news reports, this thesis adopts Bhatia’s model(2004) for genre analysis. This thesis takes economic news from The Economist as itsdata to build a small-scaled corpus. The corpus consists of30pieces of Englisheconomic news reports from January2011to January2012in order to maintain itsnature of ‘freshness’.According to Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar and theory of genre analysis,and through qualitative and quantitative approaches, we get the following conclusions:Firstly, from the perspective of ideational function, English economic news reportsmainly consist of material processes and relational processes. Besides, there are somemental processes and verbal processes, but existential processes and behavioralprocesses are rare. Secondly, from the perspective of ideational function, Englisheconomic news reports are mainly declarative sentences. The present tense, past tenseand future tense all occur, and present tense takes a large proportion to inform readers ofthe latest events that have happened. In order to keep the subjectivity of news, modaladjuncts take a rather small proportion. Thirdly, from the macro-structure perspective,English economic news reports have salient move structures, namely, main event,background, consequences and comments, which serve its communicative purpose toinform people of the latest news clearly and quickly. Through systemic-functional grammar and genre analysis, we hope that the abovefindings will provide some insights to the non-native speakers whose first language isnot English, enrich their knowledge and broaden their horizons. We also hope that theanalysis of English economic news reports can help non-native speakers to be familiarwith both the linguistic features and macro-structures of this genre, facilitate them to aneasy access to English economic news reports and help them to know the economictrend of the world. Besides, we also hope that the study can make some contributions torelevant researches.