| Approaches to discourse analysis vary due to such factors as different theories and research perspectives, among which Functional Discourse Analysis, based on Systemic-Functional Grammar, has gained wide application in analyzing all sorts of discourse. SFG was established by M.A.K. Halliday and developed by many other functional linguists who believe that in social interaction, language realizes various functions which can fall into three categories—Ideational, Interpersonal and Textual. The ideational function, realized by transitivity and voice, enables the speaker to use language to understand and express our perception of the outside world as well as our inner world. The interpersonal function means that language is used to enable us to participate in communicative acts with other people and to express and understand feelings, attitude and judgments. It is realized by mood and modality. The textual function involves the use of language to organize the text itself and is realized by thematic and information structures.In modern society, news discourse becomes one of the most popular and influential types of discourse with the development of mass media. News discourse has aroused great interest of many linguists due to its unique linguistic structure and characteristics. Most scholars acknowledge that news can be classified in different ways according to corresponding criteria, although actually most of them focus on the study of only one type—news reports. In other words, various contextual factors cause news to form different―sub-genres‖, such as news reports, editorials and columns. Therefore, as for news discourse which is blended by several sub-genres, it is far from enough only to analyze news reports, the typical sub-genre of news, without considering it as a whole.In this paper, the author focuses on two sub-genres of news—news reports and editorials, and make a comparative study of them from different angles of the three meta-functions in order to give a relatively comprehensive and accurate description of news discourse. By doing so, the author aims to prove that the approach of SFG is more effective than others in the analysis of news discourse, and also aims to expand the scope of the study on the news discourse to achieve an overall understanding of this type of discourse and a deeper understanding of its unique stylistic features. |
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