论新闻英语的文体特征.doc

摘要 新闻英语具有自己鲜明的特点，在英语新闻报刊中经常使用一些习语、俚语、借代以及一些新造词，容易使读者不得要领。如果没有基本的新闻常识，不掌握一定的新闻英语的基本特征，就很难完全理解新闻英语。为了让英语学习者更准确地理解新闻英语的内容，本文从关联理论出发，主要围绕硬性新闻展开，研究新闻英语的语法特征、词汇特征、语义特征，探讨新闻英语的文体特征，从而使读者掌握一些阅读新闻英语的策略。关键词: 新闻英语；文体；文体特征AbstractNews English has its own vivid features. Idioms, slang, metonymies and new words are often used in English newspapers. Readers have difficulty in comprehending the News English totally, if they have no basic knowledge of news, and do not master some features of News English. In order to make English learners understand the News English more accurately, this paper is based on Relevance and mainly focuses its attention on English hard news, and it discusses the grammatical features of News English, lexical features of News English and semantic features of News English. Key words: News English; stylistics ; stylistic featureCONTENTS 摘要IAbstractIIChapter 1 Introduction1Chapter 2 Literature Review32.1 News and News English32.2 Stylistics Features4Chapter 3 Theoretical Background63.1 Definition of Relevance and Degrees of Relevance63.2 Principle of Relevance7Chapter 4 Stylistic Features of News English94.1 Grammatical Features of News English94.1.1 Heavy Use of Pre-modification94.1.2 Appositive104.1.3 Participle Phrase114.1.4 Ellipsis144.2 Lexical Features of News English154.2.1 Use of Short Words154.2.2 Use of Acronyms164.2.3 Use of Abbreviations174.3 Semantic Features of News English184.3.1 Rhetorical Devices184.3.2 Discourse Pattern194.3.3 Transitions20Chapter 5 Conclusion22Bibliography23Acknowledgements24Chapter 1 IntroductionWith the development of society and widespread cooperation among countries, various media devote themselves to take the responsibility of information transference. Many of us have taken an interest in reading news on web sites or in newspapers. Most of us read newspapers to get to know about what is happening around us, in other parts of the country and throughout the world. Nowadays, international news is becoming an important window to the outside world. Everyone in the modern society is inevitably influenced more or less by the mass media. The effects of mass media influence peoples actions, ideas, cultures and language.Many new developments in language and new things brought by the society often take their first appearances in News English. It is quick, timely and easy to catch our eyes. In reality, when reading News English, many readers have found that News English is quite different from so called “standard English”, although they are in the same language-English. News English, which is based on normal English, has its unique principles. We will make it easy to fully understand the information by mastering these principles. Therefore, News English is necessary not only to journalists but also to us English learners. Perhaps English newspapers are the best materials to learn modern English. Many readers take international news as an important window to the outsideworld. We can arrange our daily life through reading news. Many Chinese readers read English news reporting in order to study English, improve their reading comprehension and increase their quality of word. Consequently, the comprehension of the features of News English is definitely helpful. This paper mainly focuses its attention on English hard news to study stylistics features of News English. The paper consists of five chapters. Chapter One mainly gives the introduction of the ent ire passage. After a brief introduction, Chapter Two gives a brief introduction to news, News English and stylistic, including the definition of news and News English, and its stylistic features. Chapter Three presents the theoretical background of the paper, reviews the theory of stylistics. It focuses on Relevance Theory. In Chapter Four, the stylistic features of News English are discussed. The paper is mainly discussing three aspects of stylistic features: grammatical features, lexical features and semantic features. Chapter Five as the conclusion gives a summary of those features that have been discussed in the previous parts of the paper. In this paper, the author will make an overall analysis of the language employed in hard news from the perspective of the stylistic analysis. This kind of news comes from American newspapers, English newspapers and online news.Chapter 2 Literature Review 2.1 News and News EnglishExperts or scholars in the academic field at home and abroad have already accomplished much research work regarding News English. Some scholar and works on stylistics and News English are the following: A Survey of stylistics and Elementary English Stylistics by Qin Xiubai; Investigating English Style by David Crystal and Derek Davy; Stylistics and Exemplification by Zhang Jian. According to the development of news, the definition of news is quite complicated and elusive. No specific one is widely accepted in the world until now. Innumerable scholars have already given many definitions to “news”. The following ones are some classical and typical definitions: a news sense is really a sense what is important, what is vital, what has color and life, what people are interested in, that is journalism; journalism is in fact history on the run. It is history written in time to be acted upon, thereby not only recording events but at times influencing them. Journalism is also the recording of history while the facts are not all in; news is truth that matters. Some other definitions in Zhang Jians book (2001:31): “news is a fresh report of events, facts, or opinions that people did not know beforethey read your story”; “news is the reporting of anything timely that has importance, use, or interest to a considerable number of people in a publication audience”. According to definitions above, news is a kind of information, which is published in newspapers and broadcast on radio and television and online about recent events around us. One thing is clear that news is different things to different people. News is usually interesting, conflict, timely, informative and surprising. It is time to talk about News English. News English seems no one acknowledged accurate definition for it, it has diverse stylistic features and involves in various areas of social activities. News English has different features in stylistics. It also can be called journalistic English, is the integration and mixture of various characteristics of news reporting. D.Crystal and D.Davy gave the definition of News English that it refers to English used in newspapers and magazines in a broad sense and it generally focus on the central function of a newspaper, to form, and consequently to the notion of news reports. It should be brief, clear and accurate.2.2 Stylistics Features Stylistics is a linguistic which applies the methodology and theory ofmodern linguistics to study style in a scientific and systematic way. It concentrates on the study of the use of language in specific contexts andtries to account for the characteristics that mark the language use of social groups and individuals. It sometimes includes investigation of spoken language, and it is concerned with the examination of written language, especially literary texts. The stylistic analysis of a text involves the description of speakers verbal choices that can be abstracted as style. A statistician would usually discuss the relevance of the analysis to interpretation, the possible meaning or effect evoked by adopting a certain style. The study of modern stylistics is divided into three aspects: general stylistics, literary stylistics and theoretical stylistics. The general stylistics concentrates on different varieties of language. According to the field of discourse, there are varieties such as news reports, advertisement, legal documents and scientific treaties. According to social groups, it has standard language and non-standard language. According to attitude, it has formal language and informal language. The literary stylistics concentrates on literary significance and linguistic choice in literary texts. It studies the different styles of individual authors and their works. The theoretical stylistics studies the theories, the origin, the trend, development of stylistics, the characteristics of different branches of stylistics, relationships between stylistics.Chapter 3 Theoretical Background 3.1 Definition of Relevance and Degrees of RelevanceThe definition given by Sperber and Wilson is based on the assumption of the human cognitive environment. That is to say, human cognition is oriented by relevance. People tend to pay more attention to information related to them. Speech acts aim at attracting listeners attention, which leads to the expectation of relevance. Although relevance is a fuzzy term, it is used differently by different people or by the same people at different times. It does not have a translation in every human language. There is no reason to hold that a proper semantic analysis of the English word “relevance” would also characterize a concept of scientific psychology. A brief introduction to the history of relevance in the field of pragmatics may be necessary and helpful for us to understand the relevance theory advocated by Sperber and Wilson. According to Sperber and Wilson (2001:127), the degree of relevance depends on the contextual effect and processing effort. However, the contextual effects cannot be achieved easily. Even if people put in a lot of processing effort, they may not achieve the sufficient contextual effects. The achievement of contextual effects always depends on the following factors: the complexity of an utterance, the explication of the context and processing effort that are made to reason the contextual effects. In the framework of relevance not all the small, easily accessible contexts will be relatively cheap in processing terms. Those derived from large, less easily accessible contexts will be relatively expensive in processing terms, because of the additional effort required to put into reasoning and selecting the most suitable context to the certain context. Therefore, the universal aim in context processing is to obtain the maximum of contextual implication in return for any processing effort expended. But relevance is a comparative concept, for it contrasts with the context and depends on the context; and it is also decided by the communicators cognitive capacity and environment, so the degree of relevance can be classified as maximally relevant, very relevant, weakly relevant and irrelevant.3.2 Principle of RelevanceThe basis of deductive inference is to obtain optimal relevance between information and context. According to Gutt (2004:31), optimal relevance is an expectation on the part of the hearer that his attempt at interpretation will yield adequate contextual effects at minimal processing cost. To obtain optimal relevance, two conditions are needed: contextual effect and processing effort. On the same conditions, the stronger the contextual effect is, the stronger is relevance; similarly, the less effort the listener makes, the stronger is relevance. The processing effort is a negative factor: the greater the processing effort, the lower the relevance. In verbal communication, the speaker must attract the hearers attention. To succeed, the communicator necessarily choose the most relevance utterance from a range at his disposal that fits best to the context, the one that will call for the least processing effort. This is summarized as the principle of relevance: every act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance.Chapter 4 The Stylistic Features of News English 4.1 Grammatical Features of News EnglishThe analyses of grammatical features usually include the following aspects: use of pre-modification, appositive, participle phrase, tense, voice, and ellipsis.4.1.1 Heavy Use of Pre-modificationLong and complicated pre-modification are widely used in News English. News reporting belongs to the general stylistics, in this stylistics, it has standard language and non-standard language. A head word is easier to be modified by post-modification than pre-modification. Journalists find that using multiple pre-modification may convey the brief information promptly. In Zhang Jians book (2001:163): News English Style and Analysis of Model Articles, it is noticed that most of pre-modification are usually one word. In news reporting, journalists often employ two or more than two words even a sentence pre-modifier to save space. News English has a tendency of using multiple pre-modification. Using pre-modification can save more space and time, and increasing interests and readability. For instance, “a 19-years-old beautiful girl” can be written by “a beautiful girl who is 19 years old”. It is to find out that the former pattern is easier and shorter than the latter one, which is predicted that pre-modification is an important trend in News English. It is also embodying that news is always interesting, conflict, timely, informative and surprising.4.1.2 Appositive The appositive phrase is also of great importance in News English. Using a large amount of appositive phrase can make the sentence brief, clear and contain as much information as possible, which is widely used for explaining persons identity, career and age and an organizations place, quality and also further explanations. This is a typical characteristic in News English reporting writing. Generally speaking, sentences in news reporting are long sentences in one paragraph. Therefore, in a loose sentence the main thought occurs in the first place followed by further information. (1) Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman, declined to comment about Apples plans before the conference call on Monday. (The New York Times, 2012/ 3/ 18)The underlined part is an appositive, it explains Steve Dowlings identity. These sentences can convey complicated ideas, and contains as much information as possible. Using this kind of sentence can catch readers eye easily.4.1.3 Participle Phrase In News English reporting writing, when journalists want to mix two sentences into one sentence, they usually employ participle phrase to simplify them. By this way, they can make one sentence include as much information as possible. It is a very common writing skill in News English. If we master this kind of skills, not only can we improve our reading speed but also increase the ability of writing and translation. In this paper, participle phrases are used as a methodology to study the stylistic of News English. On one hand, participle phrase are often used as adverbial clause. (2)Mitt Romney was the winner of the Republican presidential primary Sunday in Puerto Rico, giving him a victory that he is aggressively working to repeat here in the Illinois primary on Tuesday. (The voice of America, 2012/ 3/ 18) The underlined part is used as a participle phrase, it includes further information about Mitt Romney. On the other hand, we should also pay attention to another kind of this structure “Leaving (leave) + n + adj”. It is continually used in News English. (3)A powerful earthquake struck North Yemen on Monday, leaving more than 600 people dead and injured, the official said. (The New York Times, 2012/ 3/ 18)In this sentence, “leaving more than 600 people dead and injured, the official said” offer the consequence of the earthquake to readers, it offers its necessary information in one sentence and simplifies the sentence.Sometimes participle phrases are used as adverbial method to explain its background or pattern. (4)The assault team also confiscates a wealth of material, including video clips and personal correspondence of the al-Qaida leader. (The New York Times, 2012/ 3/ 18) The underlined part works as an adverbial method to explain what is confiscated, and make sentence simpler. Finally, participle phrase can also serve as preposition. (5)Decades ago, hiring policies ensured that the ranks of flight attendants remained young. (The New York Times, 2012/ 3/ 18) The underlined parts are used as prepositions to express its background and method.4.1.4 Voice and Tense When reading News English, it is easy to find that active voice and passive voice are both used in English headlines. In general, the writers prefer to use the active voice. Compared with passive voice, it is far more frequently used and easy to be seen in various mass media. (6) Coptic Pope Dies in Egypt Amid Churchs Struggles (The New York Times, 2012/ 3/ 18)(7) East Timor Heads for Run-Off without Ramos-Horta (The voice of America, 2012/ 3/ 18) (8) Five suspects killed in Bali anti-terror raids (The BBC News, 2012/ 3/ 18) In News English reporting, active voice is more colorful and appealing, more powerful in transferring meanings. In headlines it is more often used than passive voice.Generally speaking, the events reported in the newspaper have happened actually. According to the English grammar principle, writers should use past tense. In fact, it tends to use simple present tense to make readers feel that the news is fresh and timely when reading. Journalists employ present tense because the verb in simple present tense is shorter than the one in the past tense. Another reason is that the simple present tense is active and it is easy to let readers understand the news, which are preferred in the headlines. The present tense makes the news reporting more fresh, new, vivid and interesting to read. (9)Putin Needs Higher Oil Prices to Pay for Campaign Promise (The New York Times, 2012/ 3/ 16)Whe