Systematic-FunctionalGrammar）

The Literature Review of
A Brief Analysis of Chinese Disaster Reporting in New York Times
from the Perspective of Systematic-Functional Grammar
The 21st century has witnessed the fast development of mass media, from the prevailing newspaper to the booming Internet. Along with the rapid development of information network and communication technology, mass media is playing an increasingly important role in people’s lives in modern society. As an important means of communication and a particular type of media discourse, news report serves as the source of information, entertainment and enrichment of the cultural lives of people, and subtly influences and changes people’s cognition, behavior and values. Almost everyday, more or less, people are exposed to news media, influenced by news media, even rely on news media. As van Dijk points out that media discourse is the main source of people’s knowledge, attitudes and ideologies, both of elites as well as of ordinary citizens (V an Dijk, 1998a, p. 51).
What the author wants to uncover in this thesis is the underlying ideology hidden in disaster news discourse through a case study of disaster news reports from NYT with Halliday’s Systematic-Functional Grammar as its framework.
There are four main reasons for being interested in studying media discourse: Firstly, media is a rich source of readily accessible data for research and teaching. Secondly, media usage influences and represents people’s use of and attitudes towards language in a speech community.
Thirdly (and related), media use can tell us a great deal about social meanings and stereotypes projected through language and communication. Fourthly (and again related), media reflects and influences the formation and expression of culture, politics and social life (Bell & Garrett, 1998, p.3-18, 24). What all these shows that media functions not only as providers of information, but also a shaper of perception.
1. Overview of News Discourse Study Abroad
The early studies of news, just as V an Dijk mentioned, are charac terized by anecdote (V an Dijk, 1988, p.5). Among those studies; journalists often narrate their own experience to provide news media with well-intentioned advice and sharp criticism. The typical approach they adopted is case study.
In the early 20th century, many analysts started to show great interests in news
discourse and made initial explorations into news from the stylistic perspective. Crystal and Davy (1969, p.51) describe journalistic discourse from the linguistic perspective and summarize stylistic features of news discourse. However, they do not attempt to characterize the functionality of news discourse or to discover any deeper socio-semiotic principles that these features might serve. Brook (1979) also attach attention to the news report and contribute to the stylistic study of news.
V an Dijk (1985a) explores the structures and linguistic features of news in a more systematic and comprehensive way. He divides the news discourse into two parts, the summary (the headline and the lead) and the news discourse (episodes and comments). He also points out that the news is conducted in a sociological perspective which consists of two orientations (macrosociological and microsociological perspective). V an Dijk advances the development of critical news analysis by his comprehensive studies and published works. Since the late 1980s, he orients his attention to the study of media discourse, offering his own reflection on mass media communication (V an Dijk, 1986, p.30). Recently, he focuses on exploring the relations between power, language and ideology in news discourse and the study of racism in discourse (V an Dijk, 1998a). In his works of news discourse, he attempts to explicate that news reports themselves as well as the readers’ understanding of the new s reports need to be investigated as dynamic processes instead of taking news discourse as the end product.
Fairclough (1995) constructs a social theory of discourse and provides a methodological blueprint for critical discourse study in practice. Fairc lough divides discourse into three dimensions: texts, interactions and contexts. As for news discourse, texts refer to the news reports we read in newspapers. Interactions involve the production and consumption of news reports and contexts refer to the background of the events reported, the situational and social reality. Corresponding to the three dimensions of discourse, Fairclough proposes a stepwise procedure in conducting critical discourse analysis. Description is the stage which is concerned with formal properties of the text linguistic features of vocabulary, grammar, textual structures, are analyzed by means of functional grammar such as transitivity, modality, themes, etc.
Interpretation is concerned with the relationship between text and interaction--with seeing the text as the product of a process of production, and as a resource in the process of interpretation. In news discourse, the interpretation stage will deal with the intertextual phenomena of news production from the perspective of news sources, speech reporting, etc. Explanation is concerned with the relationship between interaction and the social context-with the focus on social determination of the processes of production and interpretation, and their social effects. The analysis at this stage turns to the broader socio-political and historical contexts. As for news discourse, the hidden ideology as well as its relationship with language use is unmasked at this stage. The social and cultural determinants, news values and the subject position of the news readers will be discussed. This three-step procedure is widely adopted as the framework of critical news discourse analysis. His study intends to increase newsreaders’ critical awareness to struggle for social emancipation.
2. Overview of News Discourse Study Home
In comparison with the above-mentioned fruitful achievements abroad, the news discourse study from applied linguistic perspective in China, however, is relatively limited.
The initial studies on news discourse in China are mainly restricted to the stylistic features of news based on traditional rhetoric and literary stylistics. The news stylistic studies in the late 1980s mainly concern the language features of the surface structure such as at phonetic, lexical and syntactical levels. These analyses pay little attention to the socio-cultural elements in the news reports. For instance, Chen Huaijie (1981) summaries the stylistic characteristics of American Special English news report such as directness, conciseness and fluency, etc. Wang Zuoliang and Ding Wangdao (1987), in their monograph Introduction to English Stylistics introduce the stylistic features of news report from the perspectives of vocabulary, sentence and discourse structures. Huang Weihe (1994) analyzes the headline, the lead and the body of the news report to summarize the stylistic features of the language. His study covers lexical grammatical and rhetorical levels and the analyses of textual structures are also concerned. It explicates the stylistic features of news report comprehensively and makes a great progress on analysis of sentence pattern and text structure of the whole news body.
Their study is limited to the analysis of formalism without concerning the functional elements hidden behind the features. It neglects the important fact that both our perception and interpretation of communicational events are heavily influenced by situational, experiential, emotional and social factors. Under the influence of Halliday’s systematic functional grammar, news stylist ic study orients from the analysis of stylistic features to multidimensional study such as linguistic genre analysis and register analysis. Many researchers applied systematic functional grammar to analyze the specific news discourse as a genre. They all do stylistic research on news reporting and explore the specific features of the style of news.
Zhang Delu employs Halliday’s functional grammar theory to analyze situational elements in news report and semantic structure, discourse structure, lexical and phonetic characteristics, as well as syntactic features at sentential level. His study explores stylistic features of news report by means of functional stylistics more systematically and comprehensively. Guo Hong (1998) adopts the theory of register in SFG to analyze the stylistic features at phonetic, lexical, syntactical and discourse levels. Chen Zhongzhu (1995) is one of the early scholars who introduce Critical Linguistics into China. He introduces the philosophical and linguistic background of Critical Linguistics, its development, its opinions on language, discourse, context and ideology as well as its linguistic analytical tools. He makes a commentary on critical discourse analysis and employs Halliday’s three metafunctions theory to critically analyze news discourses from newspapers of different political standings.
Xin Bin is a prominent scholar in critical discourse analysis at home. His papers cover not only the theoretical origin and development of critical linguistics but also the applications to the authentic discourse cases to show how language, power and
ideology perform and relate in different discourses
Deng and Zhao (2009) probes into the actuality and development of the news about disasters from perceive, reporting, writing and, so on. She also scans and thinks about the value of the news about disaster, the quality of the reporters, the importance of the interviewing condition and the style of the writing. At the same time, it specially talks about and emphasize the view that pay attention to the mental of the victims and the system of the preparation reporting disasters as well as the regularity, rules and method of the news of disaster so as to persist in the ideal of news and emphasize the importance of the disasters themselves.
Zhang, Zhang and Li (2011) focus on how linguistic structures in disaster news lead achieve news value and how news value is reflected through the linguistic structures. All the samples in this thesis are taken from the NYT front-page news and the subject is restricted in the field of disaster news reports. The author collected all the news leads about Hurricane Katrina and South Asia earthquake from NYT’ front with a span of fifteen days after the breakout of the very disaster.
Meanwhile, reporting disaster news properly and cautiously is another principle. For the news media, it should observe macro situation, pay attention to spreading environment to strive for the best social effect. Besides, it should also avoid carrying the content that sti mulates readers’ sensory organ to pursue stirring effect. References
参考文献不应少于10条，参考文献应按英文26个字母的顺序排列，先列外文文献后列中文文献，中文用宋体小四，外文用Times New Roman小四。

期刊论文标记为[J]，专著为[M]，论文集为[C]，论文集收录的论文为[A]，博士论文为[D]，词典为[Z]。

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