A Study Of News English And Its Political Dominance

Language, which functions as a means of communication, develops side by side with human society and is closely related to individual and social needs. As the world develops, the exchange and communication is increasing in various fields. Especially in this IT age, the ability of acquiring and transmitting information becomes essentially important. All messages and new things are represented in mass media, which becomes more and more indispensable to people's life. As part of public life, Mass media represent all the changes in the process of society's advancement adequately by the means of newspapers, magazines, TV, radios, etc. So the study of news English is necessary and important.Being a language of mixed factors, journalist English has its unique features on various linguistic levels, such as the lexical level, the grammatical level and the rhetorical level (Douglas, 1988). With its unique characteristics, news English has developed into a branch of modern stylistics. Recently more and more attention has been directed to the study of news English.Actually, various news media have their own styles as a part of a general journalistic pattern; therefore, it is hard to fully understand the message of media English on various media without mastering basic conventions. Based on this point, this thesis focuses on a systematic study of news English. It sums up many valuable suggestions and achievements made by scholars in this field and puts forward theories on the undecided issues, especially on the political dominance.Language is social and is not, as traditional linguistics claims, a transparent medium, being neutral and without biases. Especially the news language, which is used and presented to stand for the interest of certain group or class, so people should pay attention to the political dominance and see through the news language to get the hard fact. The practical significance of this study lies in enhancing people's awareness while they are improving their English and obtaining information.The thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter I is the introduction, in which it states the need and significance of doing this research work on news English, also gives out some background information and introduces structures and the methods employed in the thesis. Chapter II dwells on the basic concepts of news English, such as the definition of news, news values and types of news. It touches upon what news is from the perspectives of dictionary and journalist, and the news essences. Chapter III focuses on one main point in this thesis: the linguistic features of news English, which is consisted of three chief parts: the lexical part, the syntactical part and the rhetorical part, no need to say, the three unique features are elaborated in details which are helpful to have a basic knowledge of news English. Chapter IV reveals another important part in the thesis: the political dominance of news English. In this chapter, the functions of news are firstly illustrated. Then the political dominance is supported and embodied by vague words use, neologism, and the use of pronouns in rhetoric, commonsense discourse, political correctness as well as news language and power. Chapter V is the conclusion part, which gives a summary of all features that have been discussed in the previous parts of the thesis.