A Comparative Analysis Of Lexical Density Between Newspaper News And Broadcasting News

Entering into an era of informative society, news plays more important role intransmitting information. Newspaper and broadcasting are two kinds of classic mediathat have a long history and exert overwhelming influence on people’s daily life.Although they both belong to the journalism style, the newspaper news and thebroadcasting news are different from each other in the transmitting media, whichmeans news report in newspaper is transferred to the readers by the marks while thatin broadcasting is listened. Thus comparatively speaking, broadcasting news isqualified with some features of spoken language because it is listened and people’slistening span should be taken into consideration. According to Ure and Halliday, thewritten texts are with higher lexical density than the spoken text, which means thewritten texts are more informative than the spoken texts. Thus commonly speaking,the lexical density of the newspaper news is higher than that of the broadcasting news.But the news discourse is distinct from the other text styles with the unique nature ofdelivering large information timely within a limited discourse. So this thesis sharesmore interest in comparison of the lexical density between the newspaper news andthe broadcasting news than the other sort of texts.The thesis collects news materials from The New York Times and Voice ofAmerica to stand for the newspaper news and the broadcasting news respectively. TheNews of NYT and VOA are collected each day from June01,2012to June28,2012,including28pieces of political news and28pieces of economic news from NYT, and28pieces of political news and13pieces of economic news from VOA. Then theirlexical density are calculated by Ure’s and Halliday’s formula and are madecomparison by statistical software SPSS. After that some of the news features thatmay be responsible for the above result are discussed. The result indicates that there isno significant difference between the lexical density of the newspaper news and thebroadcasting news, but the clause length of the newspaper news is longer than that ofthe broadcasting news.This thesis is attempted to do some research to help the English learners and journalists understand the characteristics of the English newspaper news and theEnglish broadcasting news better, and improve the ability of the English news writing.