| With the rapid development of the Internet Technology, Twitter, as an electronic platform, is becoming more and more popular and influential in people’s daily life. In the past, we have paper news, television news, broadcasting news and webpage news. However, today with the popularization of Twitter all over the world, almost all the world-known news agencies register on Twitter and have brand new and formal platforms for news release. Therefore, all the news that is released on Twitter is named Twitter News. All the time, news is a kind of writing style, which is so valuable that many linguists choose it to study. Because of the unique features of Twitter, Twitter news also has its own proficient characteristics, especially from information technology when compared with the traditional forms of news. To some extent, all the features of Twitter represent the future trend of network language and its impact on traditional discourses.As the most influential and important linguistic theory in20th century, Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar provides the discourse analysis with a set of theoretical framework. Systemic-Functional Grammar emphasizes linguistic researches on languages as a kind of social semiotic that should be conducted within the social context. With its guidance, this thesis analyzes authentic Twitter news and webpage news in detail from aspects of three metafunctions and graphology structure. The analysis of ideational function refers to the study on transitivity, which includes six processes. The analysis of interpersonal function is mainly about the mood system and modality. The analysis of textual function contains the thematic structure and the thematic progression. There are six chapters in total and all the results are illustrated by various diagrams. In the last, all the statistics are compared and summarized in order to explain the situational context of Twitter news. all the news materials come from official webpages or Twitters of formal news agencies.Through comparison, the author has concluded as follows:Both Twitter news and webpage news belong to the category of news, so they are all inclined to describe and express the news events themselves. So they share the same feature in the transitivity, which refers to the majority of material processes. In the aspect of interpersonal function, the obvious difference lies in the tense of the main verb in finite. As the traditional news, webpage news has its stereotypes and arrangement, which also has more words, sentences and paragraphs. Therefore, either traditional news or webpage news tends to use more past tense in describing news events. But due to the immediacy and mobility of Twittter, Twitter news uses more present tense than past tense in order to stick out the instantaneity of news report. Meanwhile, there are few modalities in Twitter news, which means that the events are concerned rather than comments and opinions of journalists. Through the analysis of textual function, we conclude that the proportion of unmarked Theme in Twitter news is larger than that in webpage news. This means Twitter news accords with understanding sequences of readers, and then readers will find it easier to go through and understand, which reflects the simplicity of Twitter. By analyzing the thematic progression of Twitter news, we find that most of the Twitter news adopts linear pattern or radical pattern, which show that the progression or the arrangement of Twitter news accord with the mental process of reader. It makes reading news more easy and comfortable. About the graphology structure, because of the limitation on word numbers, there is a wide difference between Twitter news and webpage news, also among numbers of sentences and paragraphs. At the same time, some inherent elements, like title or introduction, disappear in Twitter news.This thesis has both theoretical and practical meanings. On one hand, it applies the Systemic-Functional grammar to analyze authentic news materials, which is a practical application of this theory in discourse analysis; on the other hand, this thesis summarizes linguistic features of Twitter news, which means a lot by enriching relevant research on English news and Internet language. |
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