A Study Of The Theme In English Broadcast News From The Perspective Of Systemic Functional Grammar

News is an indispensable part of human society that disseminates the latest information through a variety of media.Since the birth of the broadcast in 1920 s,it has a profound impact on people's lives around the world.Even today,broadcast news is still one of the most important media for people to get a great variety of news.Due to the comprehensive impact of news on modern society,studies on the language of different kinds of news are endless both at home and abroad.These studies are mainly conducted from perspectives of linguistics,rhetoric,psychology,stylistics and so on.Nevertheless,it is the mainstream to do research on news by analyzing its discourse from the perspective of linguistics.Thereinto,M.A.K.Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar,a complete systemic theoretical framework,has become the main theoretical basis of the research on discourse analysis both at home and abroad.And abundant research achievements have been made.Although the analysis of news discourse from the perspective of the Systemic Functional Grammar is also endless,the research on the theme of English broadcast news is not too much involved.At the same time,many English learners have trouble in understanding English broadcast news and cannot grasp the key information contained in news.Accordingly,the relevant enlightenment and strategies are of great significance to the English learners.Based on the Systemic Functional Grammar,this thesis will make an attempt to find out how to get the theme of English broadcast news and in what ways the audience can get a better understanding of the main information in broadcast news.By analyzing the transitivity system,mood system,thematic structure and cohesion devices in eight pieces of broadcast news texts selected from VOA,the author finds that 1)relational process and verbal process,especially material process take the major parts in all the six transitivity processes,in this way,the key information like the complicated relationship among different figures,and figures' standpoints and their behavior can be easily acquired by the audience;2)present tense is the principle tense to show the audience the latest and reliable news fact,and a large number of low and median level modal operators are chosen to build images of real and reliability,and the declarative mood takes the greatest percentage to deliver objective and real information to the public directly;3)most sentences in English broadcast news take an unmarked theme in order to make a sentence sound more natural,making the audience get the key information straightforward.And various cohesion devices,especially the lexical cohesion device also have positive effects on conveying the core content of news.In conclusion,we can get a better understanding about how English broadcast news deliver its theme to the audience clearly by analyzing clauses in news texts from the perspective of Systemic Functional Grammar.Hereby,the author summarizes the relevant implications for English learners and then puts forward the corresponding strategies to help them grasp the theme of English broadcast news.