Application Of Register Theory To The Stylistic Analysis Of Newspaper Reporting

The study of stylistics in the linguistics field has long been established and developed. Stylistics has gained its place in the linguistics family as a new subject. The study of English newspaper reporting is only some recent pursuit of the linguistics in the late half centuiy.It is always a great challenge to write a paper about a developing field of study, but in the case of stylistic analysis of newspaper reporting such a paper is very necessary at the present time. A great deal have been published about the subject over the past few years, but there has been little attempt to balance the practical and theoretical perspective: most work has involved detailed analysis with no explicit theoretical perspective..In this paper, the author is concerned to apply register theory to the stylistic analysis of newspaper reporting and thinks that stylistic analysis, by starting with linguistic facts, relates description to interpretation and formal features to their functions, thus giving readers an analytical tool with which they can dissect and identif~i those features of any news text.This paper firstly displays the framework of register theory. Register theory is one of the important theories in systemic-functional grammar. Ilalliday, the representative of the functional linguistic school, defined register as'a variety of a language distinguished according to use? The theory emphasizes language variation in relation to context, descriptions of language according to use, the functions which are realized by linguistic forms, and effect of three major situational factors on the functions. Under the guidance of the theory, the author bases her comprehensive mode of description on the situational factors with grammatical, lexical and textual features built in them as specific interpretative components.According to the provided approach, the paper then further provides a panoramic view of the stylistic features of newspaper reporting from three situational factors, and the morphological and syntactical perspective, thus making the features of newspaper reporting explicit to the reader.The paper next provides a practical analysis of two news reports with the same event covered to demonstrate further how register theory and the above-mentioned approach help the study of semantic and stylistic qualities and to illustrate that applying register theory to analyzing newspaper reports can deepen readers?comprehension and enhance their evaluative competence.The paper finally gives a systematic conclusion of what has been covered in the previous chapters and furthers a series of constructive suggestions for teaching in terms of the current Chinese teaching situation: the contrastive principle and the inferential principle.