A Comparative Study Of News Headlines With The Same News Source

With the development of china's newspaper industry, news with the same source is faced with an increase competition, and the quality of news headlines decides the competitiveness of news media. The thesis aims at the study of news headlines with the same news source, by employing four influential newspapers as samples which have a big circulation in Hunan Province. The four newspapers include Hunan Daily, Changsha Evening Newspaper, Sanxiang City Express and Xiaoxiang Morning. By using Systemic-Functional Grammar as the theoretical framework, and combining relevant knowledge of linguistics, of journalism and of communication, the thesis will make a systematic study of the news headlines with the same news source coming from the four newspapers.The thesis mainly consists of the following parts:Chapter One is the introduction. It offers a survey of studies and introduces the research target, the main methods and its significance. And it also explains the source of the language materials and makes a preliminary analysis of the language materials.Chapter Two presents first a systematic introduction of the theoretical framework of the quantification study—Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar. And it also explains the author's methods of quantification study and the statistics after the study .Chapter Three carries out a comparative analysis of the different news headlines with the same news source, by way of the ideational function, the interpersonal function and the textual function in Halliday's theory. With the statistics and the well-chosen samples, a detailed study is made in this part to probe the functional features of the news headlines from the four newspapers and to illustrate the causes of their differences.Chapter Four summarizes the existing problems for the news headlines of the four newspapers and proposes the countermeasures, which is based on the large amount of language materials.The author concludes that the news headlines with the same news source from the four newspapers really differ a lot and that all of the differences lie in their different natures, their different audience orientations, etc. The author also thinks there exists some flaws in the news headlines of the four newspapers, which needs to be perfected in the future by the news media.