论新闻英语的文体特征(2)

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 of modern linguistics to study style in a scientific and systematic way. It concentrates on the study of the use of language in specific contexts and

tries 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 speaker’s 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 Relevance

The 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 listener’s 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 Relevance

The 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 hearer’s 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 English

The analyses of grammatical features usually include the following aspects: use of pre-modification, appositive, participle phrase, tense, voice, and ellipsis.

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