A Contrastive Study on Discourse Features of News Reports between China Daily and BBC:
Taking Barack Obama’s Re-election News Reports for Example

Abstract
Over the past decades, news discourse, as an indispensable part of our daily life, has been the focus of scholar’ or linguists’ attention home and abroad. And many relevant researches have been carried out by employing the metafunctions in Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (hereinafter SFG) theory from different perspectives. However, most of them conduct news analysis from just one single perspective of the three metafunctions. There are only few researches focusing on all the three perspectives. The study aims to conduct a contrastive analysis on discourse features between China Daily.com (hereinafter CD) and BBC NEWS.com (hereinafter BBC) by employing the most representative dimensions from each of the three metafunctions in SFG through using the latest news corpus—Barack Obama’s re-election campaign is chosen as the analyzed object.

Through comparing 10 news reports respectively collected from two influential Internet English news websites (CD and BBC), the thesis comes to such results. Firstly, from the perspective of transitivity system, both news reports are commonly characteristic of being descriptive, informative and narrative rather than critical. However, BBC focuses on the background information of news events while CD on the temporal and situational pictures of news reports. Secondly, from the perspective of mood system, both news reports have the traits of objective narration and description. Nevertheless, BBC highlights timeliness, freshness and effectiveness of news reports whereas CD prefers the factuality and historical truth of news events. Thirdly, from the perspective of thematic structure, both news reports are featured of simplicity, intelligibility and fast location of news information. But CD stresses more on simple and fast acquiring and digesting of news message and objective narrating, and pays more attention to the coherence and appealing effects of news reports.

The contrastive analysis could provide a useful reference to know the common and different discourse features between CD and BBC. Besides, it can give some inspirations and assistances for English learners when they take reading news reports as a way of improving English levels. Also, the comparison reflects the reporters’ attitudes towards the news events in CD and BBC.

Key words: SFG, discourse features, news report, contrastive study