A Genre Study Of The Olympic English Reports

Sports news boasts its indispensible importance in modern human’s daily lifetaking the major responsibility of entertaining and informing the public of what ishappening around the world, by means of newspapers, TV broadcasting, online news,radio programs and so on. Determined by these communicative functions and in lightof the definitions of genre given by Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993), sports news isrecognized as a genre. And it has remained a hot topic in the linguistic field. Whileprevious studies of sports news mostly focus on the stylistic or pragmatic features,those conducted with a genre approach have not received much attention.This thesis is intended to be a systematic and comprehensive study of the genreof the Olympic English reports. It builds a small corpus of50sports reports on2012London Olympics, which are selected randomly from the official websites of ChinaDaily, the Washington Post, the Guardian and NBC (National BroadcastingCompany). Drawing on the move models proposed by Swales and Bhatia and Hasan’stheory of GSP, the thesis first explores the move structure of such reports. Then itproceeds to dig into the linguistic features of the Olympic English reports on the basisof Halliday’s theory of Ideational meta-function of language.For starters, the macro-structure of the Olympic English reports is proposedbased on a qualitative analysis of the news texts in the corpus. There are four movesand six steps identified in the Olympic English report discourse: M1Introducing theMain Event; M2Detailing the Event, M2S1: Consequences, M2S2: Process; M3:Commenting on the Event, M3S1: Quotations from the Players/Coaches, M3S2: theHistorical Significance of the Event; M4: Offering Background Information, M4S1:About the Players, M4S2: Other Events. The proposed move structure is then testedand verified by a quantitative analysis and the obligatory and optional elements in thestructure are worked out. The statistics show that M1, M2, M2S1, M2S2, M3, M3S1,M4, M4S1are obligatory, while M3S2and M4S2are optional. In terms of the sequences, M1and M2are in a fixed position; M3and M4are rather flexible and theyare found to show up in different moves as needed. That sports reports are structuredlike this is in accordance with the communicative functions they are to achieve, whichin turn enhances the belief that it is the communicative function that defines a genre.On the linguistic level, a transitivity analysis and voice analysis of50sampletexts in the corpus is conducted. Findings are that the six processes all show up inOlympic English report texts, yet in different proportions. Material process appearsmost; relational process ranks second, followed by verbal process and mental process,whose frequencies of occurrence are without much difference; behavioral process andexistential process rarely appear in the present corpus. That an Olympic Englishreport concerns most about the facts of an event determines a greatest employment ofmaterial process. Relational processes which are mainly background descriptions ofthe game, comments on the game and on the players, etc, are used to evoke readers’interest and shows the entertaining characteristic of the Olympic English sports.Verbal processes, mainly quotations from players or coaches or other people related,contribute a lot to the authenticity and the objectivity of the report. Mental processesare how players or coaches feel, like or think about the game and they serve to satisfyreaders’ curiosity. In terms of voice types, in English reports on the Olympics, activevoice and middle voice occupy an absolute majority while passive voice is used rarely.A great employment of active voice and middle voice contributes to the vividness andauthenticity of the reports.This study provides a comprehensive framework for genre-based discourseanalysis by combining the genre theory with Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar.It also extends the genre theory by widening its application to the field of journalism,which will help a lot raise sports writers’ awareness of the concept of genre and builda clear picture of the macrostructure as well as the linguistic features of sports reportdiscourse in terms of news writing. With this on mind, readers are assured of a betterunderstanding of the sports report.