A Discourse Analysis Of Economic News Reports Through The Lens Of Genre And Transitivity

Economic news reports pay close attention to human economic activities,tracking information such as economic development and reform.Its content functions not only as reference and guidance to regular economic life but also as wind indicator and barometer for corporations’ and even countries’ economic production activities.As a sub-genre of economic news,these reports possess particularity and uniqueness,which bear great significance.This study combines the analysis of macro generic features with that of micro transitivity features,in the hope of providing a better understanding of such genre.In previous studies,tremendous researches have been conducted on genre analysis and transitivity,but little has been done in bringing these two together.In this thesis,six newspapers from Britain and America are separately selected,which are Reuters,The guardian,Daily Telegraph,Associated Press,New York Times,and Washington Post.In Preliminary stage,55 texts about AIIB are collected from the official websites of the above presses.Subsequently,the ones which don’t belong to news reports are removed,which brings down the number to 35.The study indicates that firstly,all reports generally share the same four-move structure but the frequency and sequence of occurrence show peculiarity in their moves.Secondly,the frequency of processes of transitivity embodies generally a pattern of MA≥VE≥RE≥ME,and as mirrored by the values of standard deviation,material process displays highest instability in frequency while conversely verbal process manifests comparatively high stability,which adds evidence to the role played by quotation from a third part in enhancing the objectivity of economic news reports.Furthermore,the distributional frequency of processes in Moves manifests consistency.The differentiation of each process’ s distribution in Moves reflects distinctively the attribute of them.Moreover,concerning background interpretation,the considerations of countries such as America,Britain,South Korea,and Japan are revealed in tandem with relevant background factors premised upon transitivity analysis.The significance of this study lies in that in the first place,it discovers both “macro” generic features and “micro” transitivity characteristics of this genre,casting light on background information concerning the topic,and in the second place,a multiperspective explication on linguistic features and social background ushers readers to deeply understand economic news reports.