| In recent times, journalistic English serves as a medium to widen one's knowledge of international community and plays a significant part in our daily life. The headline, which affects the readers'thoughts and its readability of the news, is the fundamental part of news. Thus we should place special emphasis on its linguistic characteristics and informative functions. Among the wide range of varieties in news reporting, hard news is the essential one, because it represents the central function of newspaper, that is, to inform. Therefore, the thesis of this study focuses on the study of the headlines of hard news.The paper intends to make an empirical analysis of the linguistic features and informative functions of hard news headlines by'register theory'. The objective of the study is to find what linguistic features of hard news headlines are and how these features are realized in the framework of the register theory. In addition to the introduction and the conclusion, the paper consists of four chapters.Chapter One explores the nature and functions of hard news headlines as well as the key issues of the register theory. Meanwhile, some examples are employed to explain the relationship between register theory and the linguistic features of news headlines so as to approve the feasibility of the study.Chapter Two is about the data collection and the research methodology. The materials are selected under some criteria and collected from four famous English-version newspapers. The empirical way is adopted in the analysis. It is expected to conduct an objective description of the language of news headlines.Chapter Three focuses on the analysis of hard news headlines in the framework of the register theory. The analysis results are:(1) In the ideational function of language, material processes (85.7%) and verbal processes (9.5%) are dominant among all processes.(2) In the interpersonal function of language, the sample headlines are mainly indicative in mood and confirmative in structure. The declarative positive mood used in the sentences account for 89.1%. Such high percentage shows the extreme objectivity of the content of hard news. (3) In the textual function of language, the sentences that use unmarked themes account for 96.3% and they are usually structured in a normal sentence order, only occasionally with emphasis on the elements of time or location. Such a feature shows that the hard news mainly states facts and the headlines are developed in a rather standardized sentence order.Based on the detailed analysis conducted in previous chapters, Chapter Four summarizes the characteristic features of field, tenor, mode and their variable values as well as the lexical and grammatical features of hard news headlines.From the discussions and analysis of the data, it is clearly seen that the register theory does work in analyzing news headlines. Due to the limited resource of linguistic materials for the analysis, the conclusions may not be completely applicable to all facts. However, the analysis and the methods employed in this paper can be of some provocative help to those who are interested in the reading and writing of English news. |
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