A Contrastive Study Of Stylistic Features Of Straight News And News Features

Journalistic English is influenced by various subjects and language varieties. It basically employs a set of skills that helps to condense a story and to satisfy the interests of the reader with special stylistic features. Therefore, it has its own style and has the significant research value. As one of the sub-varieties, news feature is seldom analyzed from the stylistic aspect in comparison with another popular and sub-variety — straight news, which has been researched much by linguists and stylisticians from various angles in stylistic field.The practical significance of the study is to illustrate the similar and different stylistic features between straight news and news features from static description and dynamic function. In this way, EFL learners may get the enlightenment to cultivate a sense of appropriateness and therefore, their appreciation in journalistic English reading is sharpened, as a result, they will be familiar with these two sub-varieties.This thesis attempts to make a contrastive and synchronic analysis of three straight news with three news features on the same event from one of the most influential American newspapers —— The New York Times, under the framework of the theory of General Stylistics. Through the systematic and stylistically oriented investigation, i.e. linguistic description, discourse analysis, contextual factors analysis, it can be perceived that the macro-structures of these two sub-varieties are totally different, so are some features at graphological, lexical, syntactic and semantic levels. As far as the contextual factors, cohesive devices and communicative function are concerned, similarities and differences of the two sub-varieties coexist as their own stylistic markers.