A Study Of English News Leads From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

News has currently become one of the major sources for the public to obtain information, influencing each aspect of our lives. Generally speaking, paper news or website news can be divided into title, lead and body. The lead, as an important integrated part in the news, refers to the summarized sentences at the very beginning of a piece of news used to demonstrate the facts of the most importance and freshness to intricate the readers to further their reading.Today, information tends to be enormous and ever-changing. In face of the overwhelming news reports, what to read depends on the headline of a piece of news while whether the reader chooses to read through the whole piece of news depends on its lead. In other words, the lead is a further explanation and supplement for the headline. But for the whole news report, it serves as a key point; namely, it requires succinct words to summarize the outline of the news events, so as to make the readers know the major information at the first sight. For the reporters, it is very important but no easy to write a piece of news lead well. At the same time, it is a necessity for the readers to grasp certain features of news leads if they want a better and faster interpretation of the news. Therefore, the study of news leads contributes to not only the writing of a piece of news lead in the part of reporters but also a better way to understand the information for the readers.Unlike all the previous studies concerning grammatology and traditional rhetoric, this thesis tries to explore the language features of news leads from the perspective of pragmatics with Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory as the theoretical foundation. To be more specific, according to Adaptation Theory, the usage of language is a kind of making choices. In this process, there are four angles employed for the description and explanation of pragmatic phenomena: contextual correlates, structural correlates, dynamic process and consciousness salience. This thesis will attempt to analyze the news leads from the first angle(contextual correlates), with an emphasis on all the factors influencing the choice of language in the organization of news leads.This thesis comprises three parts: introduction, body and conclusion.The first part is introduction. It introduces the background of this thesis, the present study of news leads and Adaptation Theory. In addition, it displays the significance of this study in both theoretical and practical aspects.The second part is the main body which includes three chapters.Chapter One is literature review constituted of three parts. The first part briefly offers the definition, features and classifications of news leads. The second part elaborates Adaptation Theory including the three properties of language: variability, negotiability and adaptability, and also the four angles to explain pragmatic phenomena and their relation. The third part illustrates why the news discourse can be analyzed under Adaptation Theory.Chapter Two presents the news leads from the adaptation to communicative context which can be elaborated into adaptation to social world, adaptation to mental world and adaptation to physical world. This chapter thus contains three parts accordingly. The first part illustrates the adaptation of news leads to such aspects as social status, degree of education, eastern-western cultural difference, religion, language, ethnics, politics and gender. Also it points out that in terms of the content, political news leads tend to be more adaptive to social world. In the second part, adaptation to mental world is involved. On the basis of different study objects, it includes adaptation to the reporters’ mental world and adaptation to the readers’ mental world. For the former, through the analysis of the different angles to report the same topic(Christmas), it can be drawn upon that the organization of news leads is subjective to some degree. For the latter, adaptation of news leads to the readers’ mental world in which novelty, pursuing knowledge, comparison and proximity are included is mainly discussed. The third part involves spatial reference and temporal reference. Spatially, because of the faithfulness of news discourse and place’s status as one of the five elements in the news lead, the places concerned in the news leads are mostly specifically demonstrated. In addition, for the sake of readers’ interests, the reporters often employ the readers’ spatial perspective or combine their own with the readers’. Temporally, the differences of event time, reference time and report time in the news leads are firstly distinguished. And it is shown that reference time takes its change in a series of disaster reports based on the analysis of the reports concerning “Shanghai stampede”.Chapter Three deals with the news leads from the perspective of linguistic context which is divided into three parts. The first part demonstrates the adaptation of news leads to contextual cohesion. The employed means include self-reference, reference, marks of logical relations, ellipsis, substitution, repetition and so on. The second part displays the adaptation of news leads to intertextuality. Intertextuality refers to the influence of the topic, related contextual components like the common knowledge or culture, and the news structure on the organization or choice of language of news leads. This part also involves the analysis of direct and indirect quotations. In the third part, adaptation of news leads to sequencing is illustrated based on the theme-rheme theory. Furthermore, a statistical analysis of all the 42 examples cited at random in this thesis shows that 3/4 is unmarked theme. This result meets the features of brevity and clarity of news leads and the readers’ metal demands that information of the greatest importance should get known first.The last part is conclusion. It illustrates the necessity of this study once again including the adaptation of news leads to social world, mental world, physical world, contextual cohesion, intertextuality and sequencing. Meanwhile, it points out the contributions and shortcomings of this study.