| This thesis applies Halliday's coherence theory into the analysis of English news report discourse and gives a comparatively overall analysis of the coherence features of English news report texts from the perspectives of both cohesion and context of situation.The main theoretical basis of this thesis is Halliday's theoretical framework of coherence, i.e. a text is a passage of discourse which is coherent in these two regards: it is coherent with respect to the context of situation and therefore consistent in register; and it is coherent with respect to itself, and therefore cohesive. Neither of these two conditions is sufficient without the other, nor does the one by necessity entail the other.The main body of the thesis adopts the deductive method, inductive method and corpus-based method to analyze 60 sample English news reports from the perspectives of both quantity and quality. First of all, by calculating occurring frequency of all kinds of cohesive devices at sample texts, we find out the coherence features in cohesion aspect. Secondly, by analyzing three variables of context of situation from the perspective of systematic-functional linguistic, we discover coherence features of news report in context of situation.Statistical analysis shows that lexical cohesion comes on the top of the various cohesive devices in the news report discourse and that the grammatical devices are not of popular usage in this kind of texts. This is consistent with the language features of news report discourse—brevity, freshness and objectivity, which shows the achievement of discourse coherence in this aspect. In terms of context of situation, in news report discourse, transitivity system is realized mainly by the material processes and verbal processes. These two types of processes embody that news report aims to provide information to public and pays more attention to the authenticity. They achieve the field consistency of discourse coherence. Full declarative mood is the major mood type. Past tense is mainly used to report the events happening in the past, and present tense is sometimes used. Future tense rarely appears. These features are consistent with nature of news report to describe events that have happened in the real world and achieve the tenor consistency of discourse coherence. Most news reports adopt simple themes. Unmarked themes are used much more than marked themes. This aspect is consistent with the main purpose of news report discourse to provide information to the readers, and actualize the mode consistency of discourse coherence. |
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