A STUDY OF LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF NEWS ITEMS ON BIRD FLU IN ENGLISH ELECTRONIC NEWSPAPERS

Abstract

This thesis studied linguistic features of news items on bird flu in English electronic newspapers. An analysis was made to find out the news structure, lexical choices, syntactic features and cohesive devices in NIBF. Its corpus consisted of 100 news items withdrawn from 8 well-known English electronic newspapers in the USA and the UK. Together with the analysis, a discussion and comments on each feature have been made. The process of the study takes readers from the concept of text, the structure of news and the theory of cohesion and coherence to the conclusion and implications at the end of the thesis. Firstly, the data was described in details in terms of news structure and typical discourse features of NIBF. Then, the analytic method was used to clarify and categorize the data. Besides, the frequency occurrence was applied to withdraw the conclusion on the findings of the research. By these ways, lexical choices were studied on lexical items relating to bird flu (BL) and the extensive use of abbreviations in terms of compounding and acronyms. The syntactic features were illuminated through sentence patterns, the use of passive voice and reported speech. And at last, the cohesive devices relying on the references, ellipsis, conjunctions and lexical cohesion were taken into consideration. From the study of these features, the thesis provided some suggestions for teachers and learners of English, especially for journalism.