A Genre Analysis Of Diplomatic News Reports By Systemic Functional Approach

As the rapid advancement of information industry, the world is gradually turning intoa global village, in which all kinds of information are provided and shared fast, efficientlyand conveniently. Diplomatic News Reports, as a sub-news report, are not only a smallwindow from which foreigners observe China, but also an important channel from whichwe know Chinese diplomacy.Mainly based on Halliday’s (1994) Systemic-Functional Linguistics, through thescientific tool of Wordsmith Concord tool, the thesis devotes to a constructive explorationof the generic features of the diplomatic news reports from Halliday’s metafunctions(ideational, interpersonal and textual functions) and Swales’(1990) and Bhatia’s (1993)genre analysis theories. First, a corpus including 100 diplomatic news reports was built.Most of the news were collected from the official website of Chinese Embassies, such as,Embassy of People’s Republic of China in United States, Embassy of People’s Republic ofChina in New Zealand, Embassy of People’s Republic of China in Australia, Embassy ofPeople’s Republic of China in Zimbabwean etc. Second, a study of move pattern has beenconducted in diplomatic news reports, which is mainly based on Swales’s move theory(ibid.) and Bhatia’s (ibid.) seven move patterns of Standard Bank letters. Third, an analysisof the transitivity characteristics in diplomatic news reports is made, which is based on thetheory of transitivity system given by Halliday (1994) as well as the tool of Concord. Thefindings show that the genre of the diplomatic news reports tend to adopt the materialprocess frequently to describe the reality and objectivity of the diplomatic news reportsand the verbal process to achieve the communicative purpose of news language. Moreover,the verbal processes occur with quotations, which are direct quotations or indirectquotations. Not only can it make news report more objective, but also can it beautify andliven accounts, as a result, attract more readers. In addition, the mental processes arefrequent in M4 because most of words are comments. Fourth, based on the interpersonalfunction, the mood structure of the diplomatic news reports has been studied. The resultsof analysis indicate that the simple past tense was most frequently in the finite and the simple future tense was less frequently. Fifth, the textual organization of the diplomaticnews reports is analyzed; the genre prefers reference most of the grammatical cohesivedevices while additive conjunctions are used most for lexical ones.To sum up, the choice of language is subject to the communicative and functionalpurpose of genre. As one type of genre, the diplomatic news reports has their uniquelanguage features and communicative purpose, the language features of which are concise,understandable and precise and the communicative of which is that informs the readers thewhole process of events and bears the exchange of the our country and residence country.In the end, it is hoped that this thesis can provide some valuable referential informationand could be of some help on writing and teaching.