| With rapid development of globalization and informationisation of the society, newsreports, as an important means of mass media, play an important role in the worldcommunication. News reports play a significant role for the countries to promote theirinternational image and impact around the world, propagandize their political positionsand propositions, showcase their economic strength and enhance their traditional cultures.Therefore, news discourse has aroused immense interest of scholars and many studieshave been carried out from different perspectives and have achieved valuable findings.This thesis, based on Swales and Bhatia’s move theory and Halliday’s SFG, with thehelp of scientific tool of Ant Concord, is aimed to make a qualitative and quantitativestudy on news report discourse. First, we build a corpus containing100news reportsdownloaded from the official websites of China Daily, Washington Post and Guardian.Second, based on Swales and Bhatia’s move theory, the news report has been divided intofour moves. Move1is the headline of the news; Move2is a brief introduction of the newsevent; Move3provides the readers with the content and the process of the news event;and Move4gives some comments or additional information on the news event. Third, thecommunicative purposes and genre feathre are analyzed by investigating the four movesrespectively. Finally, the realization of the three meta-functions and the linguisticcharacteristics in the genre of news reports has been studies from the perspectives of thetransitivity system, voice, mood system, modality, the markedness of themes, andcohesion.The major findings of the thesis indicate that as a purticular genre, the communicativepurpose of a news report is to inform the readers of the essential elements of an event thathappened or is happening. The essential elements include the time, the place, the peopleinvolved in the event and their relations, the process, the causes and consequences of theevent. To fulfill its communicative purpose of, a news report must possess its unique genrefeatures and linguistic characteristics. Specifically, the most remarkable genre features of anews report are summarized as objectivity, authenticity and timeliness. The language employed in a news report is usually popular and understandable, concise and brief,precise and fresh. Meanwhile, the study proves the perfect integration of the realization ofthe three meta-functions with the genre features and the communicative purpose within thegenre. Finally, it is hoped that this study would provide some valuable implications for theresearch on genre analysis and news writing and offer some pedagogical insights into forteaching of genre writing and also for English learning. |
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