The Research Of Disaster News Discourse

This paper takes disaster news discourse as the research object and regards the disasternews discourse as a communicative behavior with the communicative intention of informingbased on Speech Act theory. According to the special communicative method andcommunicative purpose of disaster news discourse, this paper has adopted related theoriessuch as Discourse Analysis theory, Pragmatics, Semantics, and Speech Act theory, taken thedisaster news report published in People’s Daily as the corpus, in order to study the form ofdiscourse, the discourse structure and the cohesive device, and explore the discourseformation mechanism of disaster news.The paper is divided into six chapters.Chapter one is the introduction, in which the research background is introduced, theliterature related to the disaster news is reviewed, and the research method, the researchsignificance and the source of corpus are introduced.Chapter two is an overview of disaster news discourse, in this part, first the relatedconcepts are defined, the social function of disaster news discourse is analyzed, and thestructural features of disaster news discourse is explored from the perspective of Speech Acttheory, including communicative subject, communicative intention, communicative contextand discourse. This part is the basis of the entire research, providing the basis of explanationfor the research in the following parts.Chapter three mainly discusses in which form of discourse the content of disaster newsdiscourse is demonstrated, namely, the form of discourse and the syntactic form of disasternews discourse.Chapter four is the structural analysis of disaster news discourse, this part hasdetermined the structural elements of discourse, analyzed the essential and optional elementsof disaster news discourse by adopting Macrostructure theory and Hasan’s Generic StructurePotential theory, and determined the arrangement mode of each element. The research findsthat the inverted pyramid structure and the sequential structure are the special structures ofdisaster news discourse in differing from other news discourses. Chapter five is about the cohesive mechanism of disaster news discourse, in this partthe generic cohesive devices of discourse are described, on this bases and through thecomprehensive analysis of a great deal of corpus, the paper finds that disaster news discoursehas adopted some unique cohesive devices, such as timing words, statistical figures andverbs of area.Chapter six is the conclusion, which has collated and summarized the researchachievements of this paper, and pointed out the limitations of this research as well as theresearch direction in the future.