| News is an impartible content of daily life. It provides readers with public viewpoints, culture, history, education as well as entertainment, etc. News serves for a mass of readers from different educational background, so as a language style, it prefers to use simple sentences and common words in writing. Among variety of news, sports news is exclusive for a balance of professional and entertainment, which attract the research of communication and journalism. However, contrasted to other news discourse, sport news is somehow isolated from linguistic research. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate sports journalism under linguistic theory.Through the literature review, this thesis argues that linguistics researches of sport news are still incomplete, and the previous researches has two deficiencies:(1) researches usually concentrate on specific words and phrases, thus they are weak in proposing general features of sport news as a field of discourse; (2) researches focus on the level of semantics, thus lack the result from pragmatic perspective.In consideration of these deficiencies, this thesis adopts presupposition trigger as research theoretical framework. Presupposition trigger clearly shows the internal logic of language as well as the coherence of the context, thus it has better explanatory power for language phenomena in sports journalism. Presupposition is the information which implies in speakers’statement, or the precondition which ensures the appropriateness of sentences, and its study objects almost contain all kinds of practical genre. In views of the feature of presupposition —— It is semantically predictable as well as easily effected by the context, generation of presupposition is warmly discussed by semantics and pragmatics. Lexicon and syntactic structures which generate presupposition are called presupposition trigger. Generally, Levinson’s introduction of presupposition triggers is generally recognized by linguists. Discussion under Chinese context started from Lan Chun, then have been being popular among both semantics and pragmatics.This thesis makes a small-scale corpus of football news, which contains 20 English and 20 Chinese football news. All of them are from Internet. The detailed analysis process is to count the using number of various presupposition triggers in the. football news, then compare the data of English news and Chinese news, figure out the similarities and differences between the two contexts. Finally, this thesis discusses the linguistic features and function of presupposition trigger in sport news. Figure-ground theory has been adopted in the case study. This research mainly use Excel as research tool.Analysis result shows that 10 types of presupposition trigger have been used in English football news, and 7 types have been used in Chinese football news. Among them,6 types are commonly used in both English and Chinese context, which include definite description, temporal clause, change-of-state verb, iterative, factive verb and comparison and contrast.4 types of trigger are exclusively employed in the English context, which are non-restrictive relative clause, cleft sentence, implicative verb and counter-factual condition.1 type of trigger, ordinal numerals, is exclusive in the Chinese context. In the English context, the mostly used type of presupposition triggers is definite description, and the second is temporal clause. Meanwhile, the least used type of trigger is counterfactual condition. While in the Chinese context, the mostly used type of presupposition trigger is change-of-state verb, and the second is definite description. Meanwhile, the least used type of trigger is factive verb.In accordance with the use of presupposition triggers in sport news, this thesis argues that the news has showed three functions:to expand news information, to mobilize reader’s emotion and to be multi-interpreted for serving different readers. Meanwhile, factors affecting the use of triggers in sport news include background of sport culture, thinking pattern and functional orientation of sport news. |
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