| As a sign of modernization of social and cultural life, sports attract upsurging attention from all sections of the society. Independent sports departments or columns are indispensable sectors to all the large-scale newspaper agencies, broadcasting stations and TV stations. For the most common people, acquiring information about sports through different news media, especially the internet has become an important part in their leisure time.With the successful hosting of Olympics, news related to it has triggered more and more attention towards China. Those news plays as a particular type of news discourse and an important means of communication between China and the rest of the world. Thus, they deserve particular concern. The thesis attempts to make a study on the features of syntax in English Olympic news discourse through analyzing some news items. This study will be a qualitative research in combination with quantitative research on thematic structures, information focus and sentence structures of English Olympic news. The corpus for this study are comprised of English reports, published by various organizations of US, Britain, Canada during the period of Jan. 1, 2006 to Dec 31, 2007, concerning Olympics 2008. Preliminary Olympic texts collected are in English, among which I select reports in English that bear topics about Olympic preparing. The reports included in the analysis are made certain to be written by English native speakers of different publishers. Thus the empirical evidence found in those reports can be representative and persuasive. Finally, 10 Olympic news samples were achieved for the analysis.The thesis is mainly divided into four chapters and deals with the following issues respectively:Chapter one is a literature review composed of three parts: the survey of discourse, news discourse and sports news discourse. Within it, the definition of discourse, the origin of discourse analysis, representative approaches to discourse analysis, the definition of news, studies on news discourse, the features of sports news and studies on sports news are retrospected successively. Chapter two deals with a survey of theoretical framework and research design adopted in the thesis and corpus collection. Theories and methodologies of discourse analysis in the thesis are attributed to a mixture of such syntactic theories as thematic structures, information focus and sentence structures which are explicated separately. Chapter three is devoted to the analysis of English Olympic news discourses with the aim to demonstrate insights into syntactic features of them from the perspective of syntactic theories, as thematic structures, information focus and sentence structures. Chapter four concerns conclusion drawn from the analysis of English Olympic news discourse and implications for English Olympic news discourse teaching and learning as well as Olympic news writing.The significance of this study lies in its analysis of English Olympic news discourse from the perspective of syntactic theories and in its syntactic features identified from the sampled discourses.We hope that the research can do some help for English teachers and learners especially in their writing and learning and can offer modest contribution to the current research of English Olympic news discourse.
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