Syntactic Features Of English Journalistic News Texts And The Relation Between Syntactical Devices And Orientation Realization

News discourse, originating from real life, mirrors directly and honestly how languages are used in daily life. Therefore, for hundreds of years since its first appearance, it has attracted experts both at home and abroad to explore it from various perspectives, i.g. phonological studies, lexical studies, stylistic studies, socio—linguistic studies, cross—culture studies etc.. However a thorough literature review indicates that though much has been completed concerning news discourse, a syntactic study has not been processed much and doesn't get enough attention it deserves. Inspired by what have been found, this thesis is intended to investigate English journalistic news texts from a syntactic angle with samples chosen from New York Times concerning safety issues of Chinese products. Both quantitative and qualitative methodologies are adopted with the hope to describe and analyze how syntactic features are displayed in news English and how these seemingly objective syntactic devices are employed to achieve subjective purpose and how orientations are realized by syntactic devices.Three questions would be discussed and answered in this thesis:a. Compared with other genres, is journalistic English guided by some unique syntactic rules and regulations? Are there any standard syntactic structures? If the answers are positive, what are the rules and the standard structures?b. With abundant syntactic structures in English, why it is these structures that are preferred by journalists?c. How orientations are achieved with these seemingly objective syntactic structures?This thesis is designed to include five parts.The thesis starts with an introduction of the paper. It defines the term"news"and"journalistic English"at the very beginning. Then, it presents briefly the significance and purpose of the paper along with the layout of the thesis.After the introduction, the thesis moves to a literature review on studies concerning journalistic English both at home and abroad. A discovery has been made after an exhaustive investigation—though news discourse has been studied from various angles for quite a long time, researches from the syntactic perspective are rare. This finding lays the foundation for the thesis. Here, the review about relevant studies in China in the past five years should be highlighted for its data integrity which distinguishes this paper from others.The third chapter is dedicated to the theoretical framework. The thesis is based on Traditional Grammar and TG Grammar. Inspired by these theories, a Syntactic—Orientation model is established in the purpose to describe and analyze relationship between syntactic devices and orientation realization.Based on the above analysis, the thesis turns to the sample examinations within the Syntactic—Orientation model proposed in Chapter Three. Sixteen articles chosen from the New York Times concerning safety issues on Chinese products form the corpus. Both quantitative and qualitative researches are conducted to reveal these frequently adopted syntactic structures in journalistic English: the QSS structure, the SQSS structure, the Interrupter, the Passive structure, the Right Branch structure, the Trunk structure, the Formulated structure, the Unusual structure and the Journalistic Routine structure. Each structure is thoroughly described. What's more, reasons of utilization of each structure are also discussed. Chapter Four is the main body of the thesis and demonstrates the innovation of the paper.Chapter Five summarizes the content of the whole thesis. It concludes that this paper is a valuable attempt to study journalistic English from the syntactic perspective yet language characteristics discussed in this thesis might be far from complete and there is still much to explore about journalistic English as news papers develop and languages change.To sum up, this thesis investigates syntactic features of journalistic English and attempts to dig out relations between syntactic devices and orientation realization. The paper suggests that journalistic English harbors some syntactic features which distinguish them from other genres. Also, this paper argues that though"objectivity"is one of the key characteristics of journalistic English, still orientations are intended to be achieved by syntactic devices.