Stylistic Analysis Of The BBC Newscast

The journalistic English has always attracted attention of stylists. In many books on stylistics they often use one chapter to expound the journalistic English. However, their analysis is always put on the news report from the newspaper, rather than on some particular type of news. As the journalistic English comprises various types of genres like reports, interviews, features and columns and various contents like current affairs, sport and entertainment, the previous study is general than specific. Even if the research based itself on the newspaper, the findings are sometimes not reliable, for there are different types and levels of newspaper like broadsheets and tabloids. Nowadays, however, the newspaper is not the only source from which people get the newest information any more. The types of media differ a lot. The news can be obtained from television, radio or in the recent years most from the Internet. And the broadcasting news, as a part of newspaper, has always played a vital role in getting information and learning English by Chinese students. So from the above background, the author feels obliged to analyze some particular type of news in order to further understand the stylistic features of the journalistic English and help English learners in China.In this case, the author selects twenty recordings from the BBC World News to analyze their stylistic features on the base of Halliday’s functional grammar and some of its phonetic features. Four aspects are discussed in this thesis. For the first the author investigates the phonetic features of the BBC news from the perspective of sentence stress, intonation, pause, tempo and tongue slips and gives examples to show how it helps to express meanings. Then under the guidance of the experiential metafunction, the thesis puts emphasis on the analysis of logic-semantic relations between clauses on the syntactic level. And on the lexico-grammatical level, the thesis focuses on the mood system and analyzes features of polarity, modality and tense. At last the textual features of the BBC newscast are discussed on the basis of cohesive devices put forward in Halliday’s functional grammar. In the process of analysis, the author gives examples and statistics in order to expound her views more powerful. And the thesis is expected to reveal some striking features of the BBC news and give English learners insights into understanding English broadcasting news and English news writing.