| The purpose of this paper is to introduce speech acts theory into the study of newsdiscourse and to analyze news discourse from the perspective of speech acts theory. Inthis paper, news discourse is viewed as a speech act which takes informing as itsintention. Moreover, the informative modes used by informative subjects of theinformative speech act are also discussed in it.Speech acts theory, which was put forward by J. L. Austin and later was perfectedby John Searle, has always been a basis on the study of pragmatics. According to it,every speech can fulfill a certain act. Once a speech act is done, actually three acts arecompleted in the meanwhile. They are: locutionary act, illocutionary act andperlocutionary act. Locutionary act is the act of uttering itself, for example, uttering“sorry” is doing apologize; prelocutionary act focuses on the impact on the listener.Since the birth of speech acts theory, it has played important influences on the study ofpragmatics and it also provides a new orientation for the study of news discourse.News discourse is a speech act and its only communicative intention is to inform.The speaker in news discourse is the journalist who is responsible for the release of thewhole information. But the people in the news also conduct a kind of informative actwhich only exists in the text. The informative subject in news discourse is differentfrom the one in literature speech act. The speaker in the news discourse is composed ofthe whole media team and the people in the news and the news itself are real andnon-fictional. Once what the people said in the news is chosen to release, the journalistmust stick to it without any change. When the author in news discourse releases theinformation, the act is called as locutionary act; the information released isillocutionary act; as soon as the information is received by the hearer, theperlocutionary act takes into effect. Therefore, news discourse is classified as a kind ofinformative speech act.There are six chapters, besides introduction and conclusion.Chapter Two is a general introduction including the current study on discourse and news discourse, and some theories which I refer to in this paper.From Chapter Three to Chapter Six is about the main body of the paper.In Chapter Three, first of all, from the perspective of speech acts theory, newsdiscourse is redefined as a speech act which takes informing as its intention. In thisnew definition, news discourse becomes a communicative event and all analysisderives from the origin of the news and people’s motive to communicate. A speech actconsists of three parts: speakers, hearers, context and the informative content. Thesubjects in news discourse are discussed in this Chapter. Two subjects are involved innews discourse—the informer and the receiver. The information in news discourse isreal. Besides the journalist who appears in the source of information, the speaker alsoincludes the whole media team who are responsible for information transfer. And thenthe connection between the speaker and the hearer is changed into a newrelationship—the speaker is to inform and to guide the hearer.From Chapter Four to Chapter Six is about the discussion about the informativemodes in news speech acts.Chapter Four is about structural elements in news discourse. Based on theanalysis of the corpus, we distinguish between essential elements and optionalelements and determine the logical relationships among elements. Since newsdiscourse is viewed as a speech act, when speakers is informing, three elements areincluded—the event, the background and the remarks. So these three elementsconstitute the elementary elements in news speech acts. And these three elementssupplement and explain each other.Since the underlying structure is established, in Chapter Five, we analyze how thenon-liner substructure reflects on the liner expressive level, that is, the form ofexpression on the discourse level. Besides statements, quotations are widely used innews discourse, such as in the statements of events, background and remarks. Inaddition, discourse markers of the elements and the transfer codes in discourse are alsodiscussed.Chapter Six focuses on the title of news discourse. According to the composition of events: time, place, character and fact, we analyze the composition of the title, thearrangement of these elements and the relationship between the title and its main body.Generally, titles in discourse embody the main idea of the text, but in this paper, weexplore more about the relationship between the title and the textIn the end, we summarize the whole paper and list some deficiency and morework I will do in the future. |
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