Genre Analysis In China-related Economic News Reports

This thesis aims to investigate the China-related Economic News Reports under thetheory of genre analysis. According to the definition given by Swales (1990) and Bhatia(1993), an economic news report is a kind of genre, as they are communicative eventswith certain communicative goals. The theoretical framework of this paper is moveanalysis model put forward by those two scholars. The author aims to solve thefollowing three research questions: first, what is the move structure of Chineseeconomic news reports? Second, which moves and steps are obligatory and which onesare optional? Third, how do these communicative purposes be achieved through thismove structure? The author summarizes the move structure through inductive method.Both quantitative and qualitative method will also be used. Via the quantitative analysis,the author tries to make out the frequencies of each step and move by manual counting.Via the qualitative analysis, the author tries to identify whether the steps or moves areoptional or obligatory and to explain the achieving process of communicative goals.This is a data-based research in which China-related economic news reports aredownloaded from the website of Financial Times to establish research corpus. All thesereports are from one special column of this newspaper and40of them are randomlyselected for further respective analysis. The author finds out a four-move structure withsix steps, four of which are obligatory and two are optional. These four moves are allobligatory moves: Move1: Providing topics and reporting information; Move2:Introducing the main event; Move3: Elaborating the main event; Move4: Terminatingthe economic news. In move1, headline and attribution are two obligatory steps. Inmove3, there are four steps. Background information and comments are two obligatorysteps. Verbal reaction and visual aid are two optional steps. These moves and stepscontribute to realize communication purposes of economic news effectively. The authordescribed their functions respectively and demonstrated how they help the moves torealize communication purposes of the economic news.