| Financial news attracts the attention from language researchers since it often provides non-quantitative materials for the investor information set.Many linguistic scholars have studied the frequently-used lexical items and investigated the stylistic features of financial news.However,most of these studies focused on individual words,such as reportative verbs,verbs relating to the value changes in the market.Grammar pattern(the association between form and meaning),as an efficient approach to explore the language characteristics of various genres(e.g.,Biber et al.,1999;Groom,2005),is seldom integrated into stylistic studies.Thus,the current analysis of the stylistic features of financial news is based on the study of lexicogrammatical pattern,to examine the possibility of utilizing grammar pattern to analyze writing features.This study takes the form-meaning association as the starting point to analyze the stylistic features of financial newspapers.The study aims to construct the association between grammar pattern and the analysis of writing features.To achieve this goal,the study takes the starting point of the verb pattern ‘V n’ since verbs are the most frequent research object in financial news and the pattern ‘V n’is the most frequent verb pattern in English(Francis et al.,1996).The analysis of the pattern was based on a self-compiled corpus,which included 2,344 articles downloaded from the CNN,Fortune Magazine and the Economist.Drawing on two corpus tools,Sketch Engine and Ant Conc,we extracted 25 verbs that are unique in the financial news based on sample analysis,and categorized the meaning groups for these verbs that have the pattern ‘V n’.There are mainly two findings.Firstly,the results show that the pattern ‘V n’ is highly associated with the description of financial events.To be specific,this pattern is mainly used to describe the common interests of the companies and investors by focusing on the description of the activity of financial institutions and the movement of financial instruments.Secondly,it was found that most of the form-meaning associations represented by the ‘V n’ pattern reflect several features such as‘accuracy’,‘evaluation’ and ‘objectivity’ in the writing of financial news.For instance,the data reveal that most journalists would highlight the presentation of accurate information by recurrently utilizing semi-fixed expressions.They would use the patterns related to the state of the market in order to show an evaluative account of the economy.The results indicate that the lexico-grammatical pattern is an efficient approach to the examination of stylistic features.The study has implications for the investigation of the relationship between form and meaning,and between stylistic features and the form-meaning association. |
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