英语专业硕士毕业答辩陈词.doc

Good morning, distinguished professors and teachers, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for attending the oral defense. First and formost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Wu Wei, for her intellectual guidance, invaluable instructions and comments on my thesis. It is with her valuable assistance that I have finally accomplished this thesis.The title of my paper is The Linguistic Analysis on The Discourse of English Broadcast News. I choose this as my topic due to the following reasons. Firstly, news has become one of the main recourse to get information. Secondly, study news can help us better understand culture. Last but not the least, being a reporter was one of my dreams, though it will no longer come true, I still hope I can do some devotion in the study of the analysis on news discourse to provide some helpful principles for news reports.Next, I will present it to you. Here is an outline of my presentation.This paper consists of seven parts. Part one presents an introduction to the whole thesis by pointing out the purpose and significance of this study. The purpose in this thesis is to conduct a comprehensive and systematic comparison and analysis of features of the discourse of English broadcast news. The significance of this thesis is to indicate similarities and differences between Chinese and English broadcast news in terms of transitivity and modeling of Hallidays Systemic Functional Grammar. And to explain the different functional results between Chinese and English news reports. It is hoped that the study will not only enable students to overcome their difficulties in listening English news reports, to increase their understanding of English news reports, to raise their interests of learning English, but also provide the news reporting criterion to the journalists and reporters, especially to those who are working for international news agencies.Part two is literature review which introduces the relevant research about discourse analysis at home and abroad and then points out the theoretical basis and methods. In this chapter, the author introduces the origin of discourse analysis, and some very helpful theories in analyzing news discourse. In this part, it overviews some common knowledge related to news, including definitions of news, the characteristics of news, and the inclusion relationship between discourse and news discourse.Part three gives a detailed introduction to lexical analysis on the discourse of broadcast news and explains the lexical characteristics of English broadcast news. In Chapter 3, the author introduces lexical density, which is a kind of mathematical method to measure how much meaningful information is included in news report. And in lexical analysis on the discourse of broadcast news, it has several features that it is common that we always see powerful words, which are always simple, and contraction words and acronyms are used in news reports. Besides, nouns are always used as attributives to save reporting time and make the reports briefer. Numerals always appear in news to dedicate the scientific and authentic characteristics of news. Fuzzy terms and hedges are also used to show the respect of practice and facts.Part four makes the syntactic analysis on the discourse of English broadcast news. In this chapter, we can see some syntactic features of broadcast news. Usually, there are more expressions and fewer sentences are used in broadcast news. Of course, we use both simple sentences and complete sentences to enrich the news. Assertive sentences have absolute advantages in news reporting. Furthermore, it is common to see the appositions used in news. This phenomenon usually occurs to introduce an important person or an organization in news. Besides, there is also an interesting form in news that we usually use an inanimate subject plus an animate verb, which makes news sound more vividly.Part five explains in detail the features of English broadcast news from the perspective of theme-rheme structure and information structure. In this chapter, the author analyzes several instances in broadcast news from the perspective of theme, rheme and information structure. In this part, it changes our traditional opinion that the theme should be corresponding to given information, while the rheme should be corresponding to unknown information. That is because broadcast news is a kind of discourse containing large information. In this part, the author explains and analyzes seven patterns of theme-theme structure.Part six makes an analysis on broadcast news discourse according to Hallidays Systemic Functional Grammar. In this Chapter, the author makes the analysis on English broadcast news in context by Hallidays Systemic Functional Grammar. In this thesis, we mainly focus on transitivity and modeling theories. By utilizing the two different aspects of Systemic Functional Grammar, this thesis analyzes the news examples in terms of their communicative functionality; that is, how each text seeks to deal with potentially contentious propositions, how it acts to win over audience to its particular evaluative position, and how its lexico-grammatical and text organizational choices serve to lend more or less covert support to the particular stance each news reporter adopts. The result not merely showed how skillfully the writers utilize various news resources to achieve their purposes but it also demonstrated how powerful analytical tools Systemic Functional Grammar can be in analyzing news discourse.Finally, in the conclusion, the author summarizes the previous parts and emphasizes the significance of the argument of the thesis again. Although a lot of efforts have been made in this study, there are still some aspects that need to be improved. First of all, the corpora employed in this paper are relatively