| With the rapid development of economy, the contact and communication among countries become more and more frequent. In order to know quickly what happened in one nation, news is regarded as a good way to transmit and retrieve messages. And political news is especially given more concern because many political figures and current affairs are reported in it. However, political figures involved in the news must be referred with different expressions. So it is very important to choose proper referring expressions to refer the entity. Referring is a common language phenomenon and has been the issue in the field of linguistics. In this dissertation, accessibility is introduced to serve for the analysis of referring expressions. Many scholars have done different researches about accessibility. But in this dissertation, the accessibility theory proposed by Ariel is adopted as the theoretical foundation. Based on the theory, what kinds of referring expressions are used in English political news is explored.At the beginning, the general introduction to accessibility theory is given, including the theoretical development, the factors affecting accessibility, and accessibility marking scale. All these provide theoretical support for the subsequent study about referring expressions. Then the study about referring expressions is presented in syntactic, pragmatic and cognitive aspects. After that, some pieces of political news are selected as language material. And the referring expressions adopted in English political news are analyzed based on the accessibility theory to draw a conclusion.The news used in the research is from two kinds of newspapers. One kind is from the times which is the first mainstream newspaper in Britain. The other kind of newspaper is the New York Times. Both of the newspapers are authoritative and impactive in the world. Moreover, the newspapers cover both British and America which are the two predominant English-speaking countries. So the newspapers selected here are representative. Four pieces of news are selected from each kind of newspaper, and they are related to policy, in which plenty of referring expressions are included. Then quantitative analysis is used to make statistics about the frequency of referring expressions in different textual distance.Through the research, it can be found nine kinds of constructions about referring expressions can be used in English political news, and the choice of referring expressions conforms to accessibility theory. Apart from that, it can be found that full names are used most frequently in the first mentions to refer to an entity. And in other retrievals, constructions show higher frequency than other kinds of expressions. In addition, titles are often attached to names to indicate the status of the reported persons. The dissertation provides implications for reporters about how to adopt proper words to write news so as to make the news easily understood by the readers. |
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