A Stylistic Analysis Of English News Reports About Natural Disasters

In recent years, natural disasters are frequently occurred world-widely. Thecruelty and destructiveness of them are far more than people expected and afford.It badly and seriously affects people’s daily life. Therefore, the news reports onnatural disasters are becoming more and more important not only for gettinginformation but for that people eagerly wish that those relative department andprofessors built some preparation systems against those devastating disasters assoon as possible. In order to help the public effectively reading and betterunderstanding the news reports about natural disasters, which closely to the safetyof people’s lives and wealth, it is of great value to do a research on the analysis ofEnglish news reports on natural disasters.In this thesis,16samples are selected from New York Times and China Daily,two kinds of newspaper with a wide circulation at home and abroad. The majorsubject of the16pieces of news is earthquake, including Sichuan’s earthquake onMay12,2008, Haiti’s earthquake on January12,2010local time, Chile’searthquake on February27,2010, Yushu’s earthquake on April14,2010andJapan’s earthquake on March11,2011. Much pieces of the selected news are fromthe headlines in the front pages.Crystal and Davy (1969) put forward an approach to the aims of generalstylistic analysis of a particular piece of language or text and discussing it in termsof a number of interrelated levels of linguistic description, includingphonetics/phonology level, graphetics/graphology level, lexis/grammar level anddiscourse level. For the convenience of this thesis, the16samples were analyzedrespectively on graphological, lexical, syntactical and semantic levels. By thecombination of qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis, some distinctivestylistic features revealed on each levels were found. On graphological level, thenatural disaster news report often uses various visual aids, punctuations, andparagraphs to enhance its readability. On lexical level, some nonce words, abbreviations and loan words are employed, meanwhile, the natural disaster newsreport tend to choose some extreme words, such as kill, strike, ravage, and so on inorder to reveal the cruelty of the disasters. On grammatical level, the naturaldisaster news reports often use active voice, present tense, participle phrase,appositive and ellipsis, which make the news vivid and clarity. On semantic level,the natural disaster news reports properly use some rhetorical devices to make thenews vivid and readable, and some cohesive devices make the news cohesive andmeaningful.