Korea - South Korean News Stylistic Features From Layout Design And Methods Of Expression

By comparing the layout and writing of Rodong and Seoul Newspaper, this thesis tries to find out the differences in news style between North and South Korea and discuss the possible solutions to narrow down the differences, which provides reference for further research.News is the concise and immediate report of the recent valuable events happening domestically and abroad. Newspapers refer to the publications mainly with news reports and comments on. They are published with no bookbinding or covers. As a major means of the mass media, newspapers update the public with the latest news, and thus lead the public opinion. Moreover, newspapers have absolute power over the public language by greatly influencing the readers. Therefore, the newspaper can reflect the local linguistic features of a country or region during a certain period of time. People on the Korean Peninsula speak a single language, and there is no big change in the writing and grammar in both North and South Korean during the past half century.However, due to political reasons, differences occur in vocabulary, pronunciation, sentence-making and spelling.Centering on news style, the thesis analyses the newspaper layout, marking words and news style between North and South Korea by comparing Rodong and Seoul Newspaper.The thesis is divided into four parts:The preface reviews literature and introduces the goal and methodology of the study.The second part makes comparison on the newspaper layout. By comparing the layout, content and marking words of Rodong and Seoul Newspaper on June 2nd, 10th, 16th, 21st and 30th of 2008 respectively, it calculates and analyses relevant data using statistical method and points out the features and differences between the two newspapers.The third part compares the news style in the two countries, studying the vocabulary, structure of articles and writing skills through case study. In terms of vocabulary, the writer compares homophones and thesaurus, words, slang and vulgar language only used in North Korea, ellipsis, words with different formation as well as denizen. For article study, it compares the writing, length, type and rhetorics. On writing skills, it makes comparison on the title, opening and closing of the articles, ellipsis, denizen, Chinese used in Korean, metaphor, color of the articles, names, spelling, writing and whether the article is subjective or objective.The conclusion puts forward several suggestions based on the analysis.This thesis only makes comparison on the layout and writing of newspapers in North and South Korea, while there are many more fields calling for attention and deep research form the linguistic perspective. Korean is spoken by people in North and South Korea, thus it also should be regulated by them. The suggestions made here are based on the academic ideas in the two countries. However, the political and ideological factors have made it difficult to realize what has been forwarded. But the author believes that the language differences will be narrowed down or eliminated with the improved diplomatic relationship between the two.