A Corpus-based Study Of Foregrounding In English Political News

Foregrounding is an important term, which was put forward by pre-war Prague School linguist Mukarovsky. It was originally used by pictorial art to refer to those prominent parts against background. Halliday further classified the foregrounding and prominence and regarded the foregrounding as “motivated prominence”. The term of “foregrounding” has received increasingly attention recently as a relatively new concept in discourse analysis. Reviewing the empirical study of foregrounding, in general, it focuses on the study of literary discourse, which is less discussed in news.Political news as a kind of special style in the news, to study it is of immeasurable value. First of all, English political news follows the trend of times, so the changes of political, economic and cultural development in different periods are reflected in the political discourse. As the latest political reports in the country, people learn about the government’s the present major initiatives, the current international situation and the future trends of international relations. Political news has been gradually focused by journalism and language scholars for its distinct characteristics, however, their studies of political news basically remain in analysis of metaphor and critical discourse, the researches from the angel of foregrounding have been paid little attention.In this thesis, sixty pieces of political news are randomly selected from International New York Times, The New York Times and The Times as a corpus. The author uses foregrounding theory as the theoretical framework to analyze the whole text from the perspective of phonological, graphological, lexical, syntactic and semantic levels. From the aspects of incongruity and deflection, this thesis respectively discusses language features in English political news so as to achieve the functions of foregrounding. This study combines qualitative analysis with quantitative analysis. Firstly, count the means of foregrounding and present distribution. Secondly, analyze how the foregrounding is achieved in the selected corpus. Finally discuss the functions of foregrounding features in political news so as to help readers better understand the language features of English political news and seize the international new trends.This thesis includes five chapters. The first chapter is about research background, research significance and the overall framework of the paper. The second chapter, Literature Review, includes three parts: the definition, development, classifications and functions of foregrounding; the language characteristics of political news as well as the previous studies of foregrounding at home and abroad. The third chapter puts forward the research questions, data collection and data analysis. The fourth chapter is the main body of this thesis, from two aspects of incongruity and deflection, it explores the foregrounding features of English political news and then demonstrates the functions of it. Finally, the fifth chapter points out the main findings and suggestions for further research.