Genre Analysis Of English Television Hard News Reports

In the modern society of information, English television hard news report has become a popular way for people to learn about the outside world and acquire information, and thus it plays an important role in people's life. With its rich language and updated topic, it provides an ideal source of linguistic data for English learners to practice their listening ability. According to the concept of genre proposed by both Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993), it can be found that television hard news report has its own communicative purpose and thus it can be easily recognized as a specific genre. Although genre theory has been applied in a number of fields, most of the studies have been focused on the written discourse, leaving the spoken discourse seldom touched upon.The present thesis, by applying the model of genre analysis proposed by Bhatia (2004), investigates such two aspects of English television news as move structure and linguistic features. The thesis takes the hard news on CNN as its data to build a small-scaled corpus. The corpus consists of 50 pieces of CNN hard news reports from January to March in 2008. In order to maintain the nature of hardness, all the news were selected from the first headline news report on CNN Student News and only one piece of hard news was selected on each day during this period. In analysis of this genre, both quantitative and qualitative methods were employed. Quantitative analysis was mostly carried out in identifying the move structure of English television hard news report (hereinafter THNR), while qualitative approach was mainly used in the analysis of its language features.The result shows that English television hard news report, as a kind of genre, has its own linguistic pattern to achieve the communicative purpose within the constraint of journalistic tradition. On the one hand, THNR has salient move structures, namely, main event, background, consequences and comments, which serve its communicative purpose to inform people with a clear, quick and concise manner. On the other hand, from the micro perspective, its linguistic features are unique in terms of quotation, tense, figures and etc., which are quite different from the features in other types of genre. For example, the present tense is mostly adopted to inform the readers about the latest events in the shortest time; the proper use of direct quotations achieves the requirement of objectivity; and accurate figures make news both accurate and credible.The author hopes that the analysis of this genre can give people a clear picture on how language serves communication, help non-native speakers to be familiar with both the macro-structures and linguistic features of this genre and facilitate them to an easy access to English television news reports.