| In1964, Halliday conducted the research on Register Theory. He pointed that Register interprets what people use language do. In different contexts of situation, people choose different language. Halliday also pointed that Register consists of three variables:field, tenor and mode. Register Theory is always applied in the language studies.Journalism is a kind of discourse which can be reachable by everyone. Different types of journalism have their own linguistic features. Therefore, journalism is always the object of the linguistic research. The thesis aims to analyze the linguistic features of English news reports and news commentaries on current affairs in the frame of Register Theory, and also discusses their similarities and differences. The object of research is the corpus of English news reports and news commentaries on the10th anniversary of9/11event. Field, tenor and mode are presented respectively by three metafucntions:ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function, which are theoretical tools in this thesis. The software AntConc3.2.0w can generate some figures from the corpus. It makes the results objective and convincing.From the discussion and analysis, the major findings of the present study are that, in terms of field, lexical words with high frequency in news reports can tell readers the subject of the news. Those words in news commentaries can generally tell the subject but cannot tell the opinion of the commentator obviously. Material process is most used in both news reports and news commentaries, which indicates that reports deliver information and commentaries express opinions. Verbal process is used more in reports than commentaries, because reports employ many quotations. In terms of tenor, news reports adopt the third person frequently, because the role of writer is reporter. News commentaries adopt the first person frequently, because the role of writer is commentator. The second person is used less in both reports and commentaries. Varied types of Mood and modal verbs are often used in commentaries rather than reports, which indicates the subjectivity of news commentaries. In terms of mode, both news reports and news commentaries have high lexical density and many complex sentences, which indicate they are written language. In news reports, all the Rhemes serve for one Theme to develop the information. However, news commentaries refer to different Themes, because commentator needs different related events to support his opinion. The conjunctive words are employed in news commentaries and news reports, because they can make the texts cohesive so that readers can well understand.The present study applies Register Theory in news reports and news commentaries. It also makes comparative analysis on the linguistic features of reports and commentaries in the perspectives of field, tenor and mode. The author hopes this study can have slight influence on the future study. |
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