| English political news concerns incidents that happened lately or what is happening in the field of politics. Political parties and social groups need to initiate some polices or even take actions when coping with national political affairs and international relationship, which is the main content of political news. Serving as a crucial channel for people to gain information about the governmental policies, international situation and relationship, political news must be informative, objective and timeliness. Scholars of journalism and linguistics have done a lot of researches on political news from various angles, but researches from the perspective of foregrounding are relatively rare.Foregrounding is a significant term in stylistics, corresponding to background, automation, and convention. Deriving from the field of painting, foregrounding originally means that the artist embodies the intended image from other people or things to attract the attention of the audience, so as to achieve certain expected artistic effect, while other people or things are the background. In stylistics, foregrounding refers to the intentional violation of the norm of the standard, or the linguistic phenomenon with unexpected frequency. Leech and Short classified foregrounding into qualitative foregrounding and quantitative foregrounding. The former refers to violation of rule of conventional language phenomena, which can be realized by deviation. The latter is achieved by repetition or parallelism. In other words, when a language phenomenon appears at a high frequency, it is embodied from the background, so as to attract people’s attention.In this paper, the author uses foregrounding as theoretical framework for the analysis of English political news.20pieces of English political news are randomly selected from The New York Times published from October2012to April2013as samples for analysis. This study combines quantitative approach with qualitative approach. First of all, the author collects and sorts statistics from those samples, thus concluding the overall features of samples; then the author confirms and illustrates these features by providing some examples. In this way, this study can be more reliable and objective. This research is chiefly carried out from these two aspects on five levels:graphological level, phonological level, lexical level, syntactic level and semantic level. Through the analysis on the five levels, the thesis aims to explore how foregrounding features are achieved, thus helps readers understand and appreciate English political news better. Besides, it is hoped that this thesis can justify the applicability of foregrounding in English political news discourses analysis.This paper falls into five chapters. Chapter One serves as a general introduction to research background, purpose, significance, as well as the method of data collection and analysis. Chapter Two first introduces the concept and characteristics of English political news and makes a general review of studies on English political news, then illustrates the concept, development and classification of foregrounding. Chapter three and chapter four are the main parts of the article:Chapter Three analyzes qualitative foregrounding in English political news on graphological, lexical, syntactic and semantic levels; Chapter Four makes an analysis on quantitative foregrounding on phonological and lexical levels. Chapter five is the conclusion part of the study. |
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