| News English, as a professional language, has its own characteristics both at the lexico-grammatical level and the discoursal level. Analyzing news English will be helpful for English learners to understand and write English news more effectively. In order to analyze news English more appropriately, a proper model of discourse analysis should be chosen.This paper first lists the four parameters along which discourse analysis has developed. The first one is of theoretical orientation. The second one is of general-specific scale. The third parameter is that of application. The fourth parameter is of surface-deep analysis that depends on whether the analysis provides a thick description of language in use. The fourth parameter also forms the basis upon which the research of this thesis is done.Then the paper mentions the four levels of description in the fourth parameter. One is surface-level linguistic description-register analysis. The second level is functional language description, that is, grammatical-rhetorical analysis. The third level is interactional analysis. In these three approaches, discourse analysis has moved to a deeper description in three respects. First, it is described in the values that the features of language are assigned to realize in discourse; second, in the way that discourse is seen as underlying interaction between the writer and the reader and third, in the attention that is given to the structure of discourse.But all the three approaches are inadequate at least in two respects. First, they lack adequate information about the rationale underlying various discourse types. Second, they pay little attention to the conventionalized regularities in the organization of various communicative events. In order to move to a thicker description, the paper introduces the fourth level of analysis-genre analysis. Genreanalysis is a new model in discourse analysis so it is rich in socio-cultural, institutional and organizational explanations. This model combines socio-cultural and psycholinguistic aspects of text construction and interpretation with linguistic insights in order to answer the question why specific discourse-genres are written and used by some special communities the way they are.Since genre analysis is a multidisciplinary activity, this paper also analzses its relationship with linguistics, sociology and psychology.News English belongs to the field of English for Specific Purpose (ESP English), so this paper adopts the model of ESP genre analysis. The model of ESP English genre analysis has been proposed by Swales and developed by Bhatia. Considering the suitability for the present research, this paper adopts Bhatia's theories of genre analysis. According to Bhatia, genre analysis involves three levels of linguistic analyses:Level 1 Analysis of lexico-grammatical features;Level 2 Analysis of textualization;Level 3 Structural interpretation of text-genre.According to what this present research intends to do, this paper focuses on the analysis of level 2 and level 3.Among several genres of news, hard news reporting is generally regarded as the core news product in newspapers. And it is also the place where a distinctive style will be found, so hard news is chosen to be the focus of attention for this present research.In the body of this paper, that is, chapter 3 and chapter 4, detailed analysis on hard news is carried out at the two levels mentioned above. At the second level of analysis of news reporting, this paper explores how news values are assigned to various aspects of news language. News values involved in this paper include brevity, clarity, recency, facticity, personalization and eliteness. The paper will give a detailed investigation on how these news values are assigned to lexico-grammatical or discoursal structural features of news reporting. At the third level of analysis, this thesis explains how hard news is structured in order to achieve its communicativepurpose. The discoursal structure of hard news reporting is explored on the basis of its compa...
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