Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Background of the Study
Newspaper is a type of important language form. It is of significance to understand the role it plays in society. It has massively affected people’s knowledge and values, and to a great extent, this kind of power lies in the use of language. As one of the most popular mass medias in our daily life, news discourse is the core of news language research. Through news discourse, people can get access to the latest information. Of course, it serves not only as the source of information and entertainment, but also subtly alters people’s thoughts and beliefs. As we all know, news reflects the objective facts and one of the primary features of news discourse is truthfulness, so people tend to believe that news discourse should be value-free and impersonal. However, this is not the case. Just as the conversation has communicators, news discourse has its writers and readers. So, it can be regarded as a special type of conversation. In the news discourse, the reporter is just like the communicators in the conversation. Disastrous news discourse is a representative of all types of news discourse because it is closely related to people’s life and human security. Disaster refers to grave damage to human’s life that is natural or man-made. The disaster can be divided into two categories: one is natural disasters that can not be prevented, such as earthquakes, floods, typhoons and so on; the other is human-caused disasters, like terrorism, war, plane crash, traffic accidents and so on. In my view, the missing of MH370 belongs to the “third” category, which is neither natural disaster nor human-caused disaster, or in other words, the reason of the missing of MH370 is not certain. However, the impacts of disasters on human life and properties is rather devastating. Thus, as soon as the event happens, it becomes the focus of the news reporters.
..............
1.2 Objectives and Motivation of the Study
On March 8th, 2014, the flight of MH370 took off at 00:42 in Malaysia International Airport in Kuala Lumpur and was going to land in Beijing Capital International Airport at 6:30. But a strange thing happened. The flight got missed in the junction of Malaysia and Vietnam at about 1:20. And the control center had not yet received any distress signal. Malaysia Airlines said that the fuel of the jet could support it to fly 2 hours more than the scheduled flight time, which means even if the aircraft was still on the voyage, it would run out of fuel at 8:30 on March 8 in Beijing time. According to the statistics, MH370 flight was carrying 227 passengers, including 153 Chinese and 12 crew members from Ma
