| Based on the analysis of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) theory, the present study uses Systemic Functional Grammar to do comparative study of English world news from different countries. World news has long been regarded as hard news for its plain statement of events. But as an important media in international communication, how is world news influenced by ideology and culture, can Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis still stand in world news context? This is the focus in this thesis. It mainly concerns about the CDA of English world news features in order to confirm the relations of language and ideology, and explore the influence language has on culture. The main research instrument is Systemic - Functional Grammar, and the corpus is composed of 30 pieces of top world news in 2005 from The New York Times (United States), The Times (UK), China Daily (China).All the reports are collected from the LexisNexis database. The present study conducts both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Quantitative analysis is conducted using analysis software Coder developed by Mick O 'Donnell, to generate frequencies of linguistic features such as transitivity, modality, pronoun system, passivization, and thematic structure, and to compare the frequencies in different pieces of news reporting the same issue. Qualitative analysis is implemented on the basis of quantitative analysis to testify Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in World News discourses, and discuss cultural influences on the five linguistic features. Finally the answers for research questions will be drawn out from the discussion of the analysis results: Sapir-Whorf hypothesis still stands in World News discourses and the abovementioned linguistic features of world news are affected by culture. And in conclusion, the significances on English Teaching are briefly discussed.
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