Critical Genre Analysis Of English Commercial Editorials

Editorial is the spirit of newspaper, which claims to speak the newspapers’ ownpoint of views on major influential events in the society. It is marked by its unique,pointed remarks and logic argumentation on current or past events so as to attract,influence or even convince readers. Commercial editorial is one kind of newspapereditorials used in commercial fields which is different from political editorial. Atpresent, most of the researches of news editorials rest on only the surface level oflinguistic features，the analysis of generic structure, or the social ideologies, yetseldom combine them together to make a comprehensive study. The present thesisintends to make Critical Genre Analysis (CGA) towards commercial editorials andmainly to resolve the following three questions:(1) What are the language features such as transitivity system, mood andthematic structure of commercial editorials in terms of textual description? How arethey presented to realize the ideational, interpersonal and textual functions?(2) Does the text of commercial editorial form a kind of genre? If yes, what is itsgeneric structure?(3) From the perspective of social context, why is the commercial editorialwritten in such a generic structure and with such language features? And what is thehegemonic ideology behind commercial editorial?Based on Bhatia’s (2004) multi-perspective genre analysis model, the thesisanalyzes English commercial editorials themed on China’ economy and RMBexchange rate reported by foreign influential media, The New York Times and TheWashington Post from three dimensions, i.e. textual realization, generic structureand social explanation. Based on Halliday’s (1985) Systemic Functional Linguistics,at the textual level, such linguistic features as transitivity system, modality andtheme structure are examined. And UAM Corpus Tool is used to quantitativelyanalyze the distribution of each process of the transitivity system. At the genericlevel, adopting a qualitative analysis, Bhatia’s (2004) seven-step genre analysismodel is employed to study the move structure of the text. Finally, at the socialpractice level, Faiclough’s (1992b) social critical view is used to investigate thetextual choices within a wider social context which the discourse is produced.Adopting both qualitative and quantitative approach, software Replace Pioneer isused to analyze the frequency of key words of the commercial editorial data and it illustrates how commercial editorial to explain, persuade and evaluate to achieve itscommunicative purposes and discloses the ideology hidden in the seemingly fairlanguage with specific examples. The research findings show that:Firstly, English commercial editorials have certain language features. Theideational function of language is realized through employing material and relationalprocess in transitivity system; the interpersonal function is realized by using low andmedium modal verbs and mainly using present and past tense in the text; while bymeans of the unmarked theme, the textual function of language is realized. Secondly,English commercial editorials form a certain generic structure, and the movestructure includes “Pertinent Headline”,“Lead”,“Argumentation” and “Articulatinga Position”. Lastly, the communicative purposes of commercial editorial, i.e.explanation, persuasion and evaluation determine its language features and genericstructure. Meanwhile, hidden ideologies under the seemingly fair and objectiveexpression are disclosed.The research findings provide a new perspective of analyzing language to bothteachers and students. It is a practical application to Critical Genre Analysis modeland offers a new perspective to the study of English commercial editorials.