Abstract:In recent years, there are many unexpected natural disasters happening continuously all over the world, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, especially the earthquake happened in Japan in 2011, it suffered people a lot in the spiritual and material in Japan. The media around the world reported it. Because natural disasters are very close to our daily lives, more and more people pay attention to the English news report on natural disasters. Meantime, analyzing the stylistic features of the news report on natural disasters will help us to learn English better. 

The specialized stylistic studies on the news report of unexpected natural disasters are not very much. Based on the theories of stylistics and the news reports of Japanese earthquake in 2011 from China Daily, this thesis analyzes the stylistic features of natural disaster news reports from the angles of graphology, lexis, syntax and semantics and summarizes the characteristics of it. 

The thesis can be divided into four parts. The first part gives an introduction to the research background, the elements of the news and the characteristics of the news report on unexpected natural disasters. The second part is the literature review. It expounds the development of stylistics and concludes the previous relevant studies. The third part is the main part of the thesis, and it analyzes the stylistic features of news report on unexpected natural disasters from the angles of graphology, lexis, syntax and semantics. The last part is the conclusion of the paper. It concludes four main stylistic features: Firstly, More usage of photos and punctuation in English news report of unexpected natural disaster in order to attract the readers’ attention. Secondly, full of simple words and figures to make the news more recognizable and touching. Thirdly, more usage of past tense and passive voice to make the news more precise. Fourthly, taking different tenses of verbs as a cohesive device to show the sequence and progress of news events. 

Keywords:  unexpected natural disasters  English news report  stylistic features

Contents

Abstract

摘要

Chapter One Introduction-1

1.1 Research Background-1

1.2 English News Reports on Natural Disasters-1

Chapter Two Literature Review-3

2.1 The Development of the Stylistics-3

2.2 Previous Studies on English News Report-3

Chapter Three Stylistic Analysis-5

3.1 Stylistics and Its Features-5

3.1.1 Graphological category-5

3.1.2. Lexical category-5

3.1.3. Syntactic category-6

3.1.4. Semantic category-7

3.2 Stylistic Analysis on Japanese Earthquake in 2011-7

3.2.1 Graphological analysis-7

3.2.2 Lexical Analysis-10

3.2.3 Syntactic Analysis-12

3.2.4 Semantic Analysis-14

Chapter Four Conclusion-16

4.1 Findings of the Research-16

4.2 Limitations of the Thesis-16

References-17